Contents |
[edit] 2009
LOCKSS-KOPAL Interoperability project announcement
November 11, 2009
We are pleased to announce that the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Society) has funded Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin's Berlin School of Library and Information Science, the Computer and Media Service at Humboldt-Universität, and the German National Library to carry out Project LuKII. The project has three goals: 1) to establish a cost-effective LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) network in Germany including infrastructure to provide ongoing technical support and management for LOCKSS and its variants network in Germany; 2) to conceptualize and implement interoperability between LOCKSS and KOPAL in order to combine cost-effective bitstream preservation with well-developed usability preservation tools; and 3) to test the interoperability prototype by archiving data from German institutional repositories.
The LOCKSS Program, founded in 1998 at Stanford University Library, will be a collaborating partner. "In the online environment," writes Vicky Reich, LOCKSS Program Director, "community implementation and control of economically sustainable and technically robust digital preservation infrastructure is essential for long term continued access to scholarly and national heritage materials. The LOCKSS Program, Stanford University is honored to be participating in this collaborative effort to help keep German digital assets safe."
The German National Library is the national depository for all print and electronic materials published in Germany. It has a mandate both to archive and to guarantee long-term access. In cooperation with its partners it has implemented and continues to support a long-term archive for digital objects (KOPAL). It also hosts nestor, the network of expertise for digital preservation in Germany and is involved in a host of other digital preservation projects.
The Berlin School of Library and Information Science is a member of the interntional iSchool / iCaucus group and offers bachelors, masters, and doctoral programs in library and information science. The Computer and Media Service is a member of both nestor and DINI, the German Initiative for Networked Information.
For more information see: http://www.ibi.hu-berlin.de/forschung/digibib/forschung/projekte/LuKII
CLOCKSS Welcomes Two New Publishers: Royal Society of Chemistry and Royal Society
November 9, 2009
CLOCKSS is pleased to announce that two new society publishers have recently joined the CLOCKSS archive. The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society have signed agreements this fall to join CLOCKSS and preserve their materials in the CLOCKSS network of geographically and geopolitically distributed archive nodes. CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a community-governed, not-for-profit archive founded by librarians and publishers to ensure the long-term availability of scholarly digital content.
As part of joining CLOCKSS, the two societies agree to release their archived content to the world for free if a time comes when it is no longer available from any publisher ("trigger event"). “The Royal Society of Chemistry is pleased to be involved with the CLOCKSS archiving program. We appreciate the importance of archiving articles from important scholarly journals for future generations of researchers and see CLOCKSS as a major initiative within this area,” said James Milne, the Editorial Director of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society will also each appoint representatives to the CLOCKSS board. The board is made up of world-leading publishers and libraries who work together to govern the archive and set strategies and policies, such as how to extend CLOCKSS to smaller scholarly publishers and those in the developing world. Stuart Taylor, Head of Publishing at Royal Society Publishing, commented that, “In an increasingly digital age in which the use of print journals is declining rapidly, the question of the long term security of digital content is a critical one. We are pleased to be joining CLOCKSS which offers a well thought-out and organised solution for scholars, publishers and librarians.”
“We are pleased to welcome these new societies to the CLOCKSS community. The commitment is growing among publishers to preserve their content in a way that keeps it in the hands of scholars,” said CLOCKSS Co-Chair Gordon Tibbitts. “The CLOCKSS model really appeals to scholarly societies and their members, who want to make sure their materials remain as useful and available as possible over the very long term.”
About RSC Publishing RSC Publishing is a not-for-profit publisher wholly owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. One of the largest and most dynamic publishers of chemical science information in the world, RSC's publishing activity dates back to 1841 and features a wide range of journals, magazines, databases and books. http://www.rsc.org/publishing
About Royal Society Publishing Royal Society Publishing is the publishing division of the Royal Society. The Royal Society is the world's oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, and has been at the forefront of enquiry and discovery since its foundation in 1660. http://royalsocietypublishing.org
LOCKSS Program Preserves Orphaned Title, Pain Reviews
October 22, 2009
Pain Reviews, an open access electronic journal that ceased publication in 2002, is being securely preserved in the LOCKSS distributed preservation network. Pain Reviews, published by Hodder Arnold from 1998 through 2002 is freely available online via the IngentaConnect publishing platform through to December 2009 (see http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/arn/pr).
LOCKSS Program staff in the United States and in the United Kingdom worked closely with Publishing Technology and Hodder Arnold to ensure that Pain Reviews would be preserved in a way that benefited all scholars, worldwide.
Hodder Arnold first gave permission for Pain Reviews to be freely available. This open access permits all LOCKSS Alliance members to collect and preserve Pain Reviews independent of whether or not they previously held a subscription.
Hodder Arnold then licensed the content with a Creative Commons license to ensure the uses and rights of the content are clear and transparent, and that legal future use of this material is flexible.
Libraries that select and preserve Pain Reviews in LOCKSS will have access to this journal in perpetuity, without any further payment for access.
Victoria Reich, Director of LOCKSS, notes, "Pain Reviews is an outstanding example of how libraries are using the distributed digital preservation LOCKSS Program (www.lockss.org) to take custody of and preserve important scholarly materials. LOCKSS technology provides an affordable, managed distributed digital preservation environment, including migrating content when required for continued access. That Pain Reviews is assigned a Creative Commons (CC) license is an extra bonus. The CC license enables archive interoperability and opens the opportunity for this open access content to be made freely available even after it's removed from the publisher's hosting platform."
Louise Tutton, Senior Vice President of Publishing Technology's Scholarly Division, comments, "Cancellation of titles is a reality both for publishers and publishing platforms. Where title cancellation occurs, we are delighted to see this content made available for preservation through services such as the LOCKSS Program, allowing librarians to take active measures to build collections of content important to their scholars and ensure its long term preservation."
Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA and the UK LOCKSS Alliance, adds "Pain Reviews highlights the advantage of the community driven approach taken by the UK LOCKSS Alliance. The UK LOCKSS Alliance community brought this title to our attention, which led to LOCKSS staff in the UK and US preparing the title and its contents for long term preservation and ready (open) access. I am delighted that this process has ensured continuity of access to Pain Reviews for libraries in the UK and internationally."
CLOCKSS and CrossRef Collaboration Makes it Easier to Find Discontinued Journal Articles
September 10, 2009
CLOCKSS and CrossRef have implemented the means to track articles from discontinued journals using the CrossRef DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) originally assigned to the articles. When a published journal or other content is no longer available from a publisher, an archive that stores that content experiences a “trigger event.” CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) experienced its first trigger events with the SAGE Publications' journals Auto/Biography and Graft and Oxford University Press' Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention. These events led to the discovery that CrossRef would need to accommodate multiple DOI resolution, as the affected titles were stored in multiple archives. All three titles are now available for free at http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Triggered_Content.
“Two important tenets of CrossRef’s mission are persistence and cooperation,” said Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef. “Making sure that the CrossRef DOIs that have been assigned to content that has moved from a publisher journal platform to an archive still resolve to the articles is an important part of that persistence. Persistence is not only achieved through technology but by cooperation: CrossRef, publishers, journal hosting services, and the archiving organizations have all worked together to ensure continued access to the scholarly record. These journals are particularly strong examples of the system in action as there are multiple archives available to guarantee ongoing access.”
“The CLOCKSS Archive, the community-governed archiving initiative with broad support from publishers large and small, CrossRef, and the library community, has made all three journals openly available from two geographically separate sites,” notes Gordon Tibbitts, Co-Chair CLOCKSS Board of Directors. CLOCKSS truly serves the world's scholars by ensuring content no longer available from any publisher is available to everyone for free.”
The following are live examples of CrossRef DOIs from each of the archived journals:
Auto/Biography: http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0967550706ab044oa
Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brief-treatment/mhg012
LOCKSS Chief Scientist Speaks at Library of Congress
August 23, 2009
When David Rosenthal talks, people listen. They may not always agree with the Chief Scientist of the LOCKSS program based at Stanford University, but they engage with what he has to say.
This was the case on July 27, 2009, when a large crowd gathered at the Library of Congress to hear Rosenthal’s presentation, "How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents?". Rosenthal’s talk was a reprise of his widely-discussed plenary at the Spring 2009 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force meeting. In his introduction at the CNI meeting, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch told the audience that Rosenthal’s work had changed his thinking about digital preservation.
Rosenthal's presentation at the Library was filmed and is available as a webcast. http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4629
LOCKSS and Archive-It Interoperability!
July 21, 2009
We are pleased to announce that Web data harvested using ArchiveIt into the Internet Archive was successfully re-harvested into a LOCKSS network for preservation. The transfer was part of a Andrew W. Mellon foundation project with the University of Rochester.
If you are interested in learning more, please contact the LOCKSS team lockss-support (at) lockss (dot) org or the Archive-It team, http://www.archive-it.org/
From the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Spring 2009 Task Force Meeting
July 13, 2009
Video of Dr. David Rosenthal's Plenary Presentation, "How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents?" is now available from http://vimeo.com/5407401.
[edit] Clifford Lynch introduces David Rosenthal
"It's my really sincere pleasure to introduce David Rosenthal as our opening Plenary Speaker. I've known David for quite a long time now. He's well known in our community for his work on the LOCKSS Program at Stanford. He's actually done a tremendous amount of stuff in the computer industry going back over 20 years. He was an early person at Sun Microsystems, worked on the Andrew Project at Carnegie Mellon. He was very early at Nvidia, which builds high-performance graphics chips, which are probably in most of your laptops, at least if you have a fairly recent one. And, has also been involved with a variety of other things at Stanford.
David has been doing something really important for all of us for the last few years, which is, he's been doing some stepping back and trying to think critically about our assumptions about digital preservation.
Without stealing any of his thunder, hopefully, I want to say that in the last few years, particularly, I've become very uneasy with some of the sort of enshrined assumptions in this area. Some of which were laid down by very good and insightful work. But work that was done ten or fifteen years ago and that really was done by people grounded in the experiences of an era that's quite different than the one we're dealing in now, an era that perhaps was much more characterized by digital incunabula rather than the sort of, increasingly ubiquitous digital material that we're facing now at almost incomprehensible scale.
David has gone back systematically and asked: “Are these assumptions right?”; “Are they wrong?” “If they're wrong, what are more accurate assumptions - where do those assumptions lead us?”
I think that it's very, very important for us to engage this kind of thinking as we plan our production - “gotta get it right because our society depends on it” digital preservation strategies and digital preservation programs.
So, I invite you to listen to David's reflections on this, to think hard about them. I have been fortunate enough to be able to preview some of this material on a couple of different occasions. I will tell you for whatever it's worth, it's certainly changed some of my thinking about digital preservation. I won't promise that it will change yours but I will promise that whatever opinions you hold on it after hearing David will be far better grounded and far better informed.
Please join me in welcoming David Rosenthal."
AIP Partners with CLOCKSS to Digitally Archive
June 15, 2009
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has announced it will preserve its award-winning publications in the CLOCKSS digital archive of scholarly research content. AIP will place over 150,000 articles in the archive, including back-file materials dating back to 1999.
CLOCKSS is a community-governed, not-for-profit collaboration between librarians and publishers. The CLOCKSS archive ensures the long-term availability of scholarly digital content. With CLOCKSS, content is housed and preserved at major research libraries around the world. When a title is no longer available from any publisher, and with the approval of the CLOCKSS Board of Directors, that title is copied from the archive and made freely available to everyone with a Web browser. The Board is composed equally of publishers and libraries. Additionally, CLOCKSS supporters appoint one representative to serve on the CLOCKSS Advisory Council.
"AIP has long been committed to digital archiving, formulating our first policy statement on the subject more than 10 years ago," said Tim Ingoldsby, AIP's Director of Strategic Initiatives and Publisher Relations. "In the intervening years, we've been gratified when other publishers have taken our framework as a model when fashioning their own archiving policy."
Free Online Access to Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention Available through CLOCKSS
April 27, 2009
Oxford Journals announced today that the journal Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention, which has been discontinued, will be accessible through CLOCKSS.
Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention ceased publication at the end of 2008. Archival content from volume 1, issue 1 (2001) to volume 8, issue 4 (2008) will be removed from the Oxford Journals online platform at the end of May 2009. Only CLOCKSS, one of OUP's preservation partners, will provide free access to the title and take responsibility for its ongoing long-term preservation.
Fiona Kearney, Director for UK Business Development & Rights for Oxford University Press, commented: "We are proud to participate in these preservation initiatives so that readers of this journal can continue to access archival content even after it has ceased publication and to ensure the continuity of the electronic scholarly record."
"Oxford University Press, along with the other founding members of CLOCKSS, agreed early on to make triggered content in CLOCKSS available to the world for free," explained Gordon Tibbitts, Co-Chair of the CLOCKSS board. "That policy, along with CLOCKSS' low operating costs, and its community-based leadership, sets CLOCKSS apart. In these challenging economic times CLOCKSS enables libraries of all sizes to benefit from its digital preservation efforts."
Saving for the Future
February/March 2009
In this Research Information article, Neil Grindley of JISC describes the importance of preserving digital information and some of the major projects that are helping with this. Grindley writes: "There are many innovative DP initiatives underway, several of which receive funding from JISC. The UK LOCKSS Alliance (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) addresses electronic scholarly journals. As its name suggests, LOCKSS helps institutions retain access to their data assets – in this case archived e-journals – by storing copies on several external servers. This safeguard encourages educational institutions to engage with the issue and gives them the confidence to progress the move from print to more easily searchable e-journals. By being part of the collaborative UK LOCKSS Alliance, the risks to individual institutions of online storage are removed. In layman’s terms, LOCKSS is the closest that libraries can get to doing digitally what they used to do with actual journals; they get to keep a copy. With copyright remaining a worry for some parties, CLOCKSS (C for ‘Controlled’) is a similar venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries."
Read the article in its entirety here
Excerpt from "A Cautionary Look at Online Literary Magazines" by Jessica Powers
February 24, 2009
"Some online publications are members of the international LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) system, which takes continual snapshots of select publications, then saves them in their digital archive. 'Thus, should said publication ever go the way of the dodo, or lose their server and disappear off the web, the actual publication never disappears,' says Didato."
Read the whole essay here
Momentum Grows for Long-term Preservation Strategy of Digital Content
January 27, 2009
Support for the community-governed archive cooperative, CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), continues to grow as they announce the addition of the University of Alberta as its newest governing library member. The University of Alberta Libraries is a member of the Association of Research Libraries and has the second largest academic and research collection in Canada. The CLOCKSS initiative was created in response to the growing concern that digital content purchased by libraries may not always be available due to retirement of an electronic journal or catastrophic events. CLOCKSS addresses this problem by creating a secure, multi-site archive of web-published content that can be tapped into as necessary to provide ongoing access to researchers worldwide for free. "We are proud to welcome the University of Alberta as our first Canadian partner," says Gordon Tibbitts, CEO of bepress and Co-Chair of the CLOCKSS Board of Directors. "Adding another global partner to the network further solidifies CLOCKSS leadership in providing a cost-sensitive and effective long-term archiving solution that services the entire scholarly community."
From The New York Times article, "A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts"
January 26, 2009
"To that end, another computer scientist, Brewster Kahle, founded the Internet Archive in 1996 in an effort to preserve a complete record of the World Wide Web and other digital documents. Similarly, in 2000 librarians at Stanford University created LOCKSS, or Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, to preserve journals in the digital age, by spreading digital copies of documents through an international community of libraries via the Internet."
Read the entire New York Times article here .
Vicky Reich Kicks off NISO's Webinar Series
January 9, 2009
NISO (National Information Standards Organization) presents its 2009 webinar series, beginning on January 14, 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. EST, with Digital Preservation: Current Efforts.
Vicky's talk, "CLOCKSS, A Global Archive: Libraries and Publishers Preserving the Past for the Future," will cover why the academic publishing and research communities have embraced CLOCKSS as a long-term preservation solution.
To attend the event, please visit the NISO webinar webpage .
[edit] 2008
Announcing the Alabama Digital Preservation Network
December 17, 2008
The Network of Alabama Academic Libraries recently completed a two-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and successfully developed a low-cost, low-maintenance, sustainable, geographically distributed digital preservation solution. The project participants established a private network to archive locally created digital files using LOCKSS technology. The Alabama Digital Preservation Network ADPNnet maintains LOCKSS servers at the Alabama Department of Archives and History; Auburn University; Spring Hill College; Troy University; The University of Alabama; Mervyn H. Sterne Library at University of Alabama at Birmingham; and the University of North Alabama. Any Alabama repository with publicly-available digital content may use ADPNet for its preservation archive. For more information, contact Sue O. Medina, Network of Alabama Academic Libraries, sue.medina@ache.alabama.gov or call 334-242-2211.
Springer helps launch CLOCKSS archive
December 3, 2008
Springer Science+Business Media, publisher of one of the world’s most comprehensive online collections of scientific, technological and medical journals, books and reference works, announces a partnership with the community-governed archive cooperative CLOCKSS to preserve Springer content in the CLOCKSS global archive. Springer publishes over 1,700 journals and more than 5,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook collection worldwide. Springer is a founding member of CLOCKSS.
The CLOCKSS archive allows research libraries and scholarly publishers, who launched CLOCKSS as a pilot program, to preserve and store its electronic content. Once ingested, the e-content is kept safe and secure in a dark archive until it is triggered and the CLOCKSS Board determines that the content should be copied from the archive and made freely available to all, regardless of prior subscription. Due to the success of the pilot program, the founding members unanimously agreed to incorporate and invite others to participate in CLOCKSS.
Announcing the U.S. Government Documents Private LOCKSS Network
October 17, 2008
We are pleased to announce the launch of the United States Government Documents Private LOCKSS Network (PLN). Twelve libraries, working with Carl Malamud’s http://public.resource.org site, will be harvesting and preserving this critical content in a distributed digital preservation system. First to be preserved are the GPO documents hosted at http://bulk.resource.org with other collections to follow.
The "USDocs" PLN replicates key aspects of the United States Federal Depository System. The content is held in geographically distributed sites and replicated many times. Citizens have oversight and responsibility for the long-term care and maintenance of the content. All these characteristics mean the content will be preserved so that any alteration of the content (either deliberate or accidental) will be detected and repaired. For all documents, preservation in a tamper-evident environment is important, but for government documents, this is essential. Read more: Private LOCKSS Networks.
On a Mission: Daniel Cornwall, Alaska State Library
March 15, 2008
Library Journal's "Mover and Shaker" Dan Cornwall, Head of Information Services, Alaska State Library, entrusted LOCKSS technology to safeguard Alaska's state documents. Read about it here.
Vicky Reich, LOCKSS Director and co-founder, honored with the 2008 Ulrich's Serials Librarianship Award
February 22, 2008
The LOCKSS Program is proud to announce that Vicky Reich is the recipient of the 2008 Ulrich's Serials Librarianship Award in recognition of her distinguished and ongoing contributions to the field of digital preservation. Vicky's leadership role in the development and adoption of digital preservation solutions like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS ensures the accessibility of serial publications and other digital content for future generations. Read the press release here.
PsychiatryOnline.com Textbook to Be Preserved Via LOCKSS
February 19, 2008
LOCKSS is a unique digital preservation solution that enables libraries to easily and inexpensively collect and preserve their own copy of authorized e-content. LOCKSS Alliance members who subscribe to the American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Fourth Edition at PsychiatryOnline.com will have access to this e-book in perpetuity. The Fourth Edition of the Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry is being made available for LOCKSS preservation in conjunction with the March 2008 release of the new Fifth Edition to current subscribers at http://www.PsychiatryOnline.com, the book-and-journal portal from APPI.
"We are thrilled to support APPI in its endeavor to preserve for future generations, not simply its world-class e-journals on the LOCKSS system, but also this important digital textbook. Through these actions, APPI helps libraries fulfill their role as custodians of scholarly content," says Vicky Reich, LOCKSS Director.
“We feel lucky to have the LOCKSS system as a preservation solution,” says Pam Harley, Director of e-Publishing Strategy at APPI, “and to be able to extend their innovative and collaborative approach beyond our journals to our key online textbooks, making sure they remain accessible for generations to come.”
New LOCKSS YouTube video: "Why Libraries Should Join LOCKSS"
January 7, 2008
A new YouTube video detailing why libraries need LOCKSS was recently created by University of Michigan School of Information graduate students. In the two-part series, they do an impressive job walking the viewer through the advantages and benefits of being a LOCKSS Alliance participant. We thought you might be find the video interesting, and we encourage you to share it with others: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POJf38RzihA (part 1) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKr1Adc8tnA (part 2).[edit] 2007
Over 200 Scholarly Publishers Participating in LOCKSS
November 27, 2007
The LOCKSS Program is pleased to announce that best-of-breed scholarly journals from over two hundred publishers, including BMJ Group and the Oxford University Press, will be preserved in LOCKSS. LOCKSS, developed at Stanford University Libraries, provides the tools, services, and publisher support that ensure libraries access to their web-based subscriptions in perpetuity. By joining LOCKSS, publishers of the New England Journal of Medicine, AnthroSource, and others, have granted permission to LOCKSS-participating libraries to preserve an electronic copy of their subscribed content locally in a "LOCKSS box." When an article or book can no longer be accessed on the publisher’s website, LOCKSS libraries will be able to serve it to their readers in real-time -- today and for years to come.
"A core library mission is to build and perpetuate collections. The LOCKSS system helps them in their task by allowing the library to collect, preserve, and serve to authorized readers its own copy of the web-based content when the publisher’s copy is unavailable," explains LOCKSS Director Vicky Reich. "The high level of publisher participation in LOCKSS enables libraries to offer tomorrow’s readers access to more of today’s publications."
Bringing Up a LOCKSS box in 5 minutes, 6 seconds
October 8, 2007
Angela Slaughter, Indiana University Libraries, stars in this short YouTube video of how to bring a LOCKSS box online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wdcnXrQkaI
Blog Preservation
July 19, 2007
We are pleased to announce blog preservation in the LOCKSS system. As of today, LOCKSS Alliance participants can preserve selected content hosted on Blogger, Google's blog hosting platform. Blogs are growing in intellectual importance. This is an important milestone for the LOCKSS Program and for libraries that are building local collections in the web environment.
Library of Congress Interview on Sustainability
July 12, 2007
The Library of Congress NDIIPP staff interviewed the LOCKSS Program about the vexing issues of how to sustain digital preservation programs for the very long term. Read this short report.
LOCKSS YouTube video at ALA
June 27, 2007
Karen G. Schneider, a well known and respected librarian who writes about Internet technologies, produced a YouTube video on the LOCKSS Program (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOE_Jw23cVg) for the ALA BIGWIG Social Software Showcase. The cat's name is Emma.RLG DigiNews preserved on the LOCKSS System
June 20, 2007
"For more than a decade, RLG DigiNews provided a reliable source of current information about developments and research results in digital imaging and digital preservation from an applied and problem-solving perspective. The content included in-depth articles describing innovative approaches, providing lessons learned, and recommending next steps; FAQs on organizational and technological topics; highlighted websites on emerging technologies and trends; and special features like conference reports and document reviews. This bi-weekly online publication documented the milestones and progress of an emergent digital preservation community, from shortly after the publication of the seminal 1996 report, "Preserving Digital Information," forward. When we announced that RLG DigiNews would be transitioning into a redesigned OCLC publication, we received numerous notes from readers, many of whom expressed concern about the future of existing content, much of which is of ongoing interest to and actively linked to by educators, students, practitioners, and researchers engaged in lifecycle aspects of the digital cultural heritage. Given their interest in long-term availability and our own, we were very pleased to be contacted by the UK Open LOCKSS team about preserving RLG DigiNews and we enthusiastically embraced meeting the publisher requirements for adding content to LOCKSS. We hope that you will add RLG DigiNews to your LOCKSS box." -- Robin Dale, Associate Editor, 1997-2007; Anne R. Kenney, Editor/Co-Editor, 1997-2007; Nancy Y. McGovern, Co-Editor, 2001-2006
Spring 2007 U.S. Depository Library Conference
May 1, 2007
Presentations from the LOCKSS Docs session are available at Free Government Information.
LOCKSS Team featured by Library of Congress
April 24, 2007
Pioneers of Digital Preservation on the Library of Congress' web site features an overview of the LOCKSS program.
Presentation at CNI
April 17, 2007
Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal talked at the CNI meeting in Phoenix, AZ. Vicky gave an overview of the status of the CLOCKSS program, and David talked on Can We Afford To Preserve Large Databases?.
OpenLOCKSS Project Launched
April 4, 2007
We are pleased to announce the OpenLOCKSS project, funded by JISC and led by the University of Glasgow. Through this important initiative the UK library community is taking an important first step to identify and preserve open access electronic journals with long term value to the UK scholarly community. OpenLOCKSS project website
CLOCKSS Wins ALA ALCTS Collaboration Award
March 9, 2007
ALCTS is proud to announce the CLOCKSS Initiative as the first-ever winner of the ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation. CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS), a not-for-profit partnership, leverages the contributions of key members of the scholarly communications community. Building on the widely-used LOCKSS system and working outside the limitations of business models or current technology, CLOCKSS is creating a distributed, validated, platform-neutral archive to ensure the long-term preservation of digitally published scholarly materials. CLOCKSS benefits everyone regardless of their ability to pay. By working together to develop and govern the archive, CLOCKSS is a shared solution to one of the most significant challenges of the digital era. Read the press release.
New LOCKSS Platform Released
January 25, 2007
Approximately every six months, the LOCKSS team upgrades the LOCKSS Platform, the software that makes your LOCKSS box as easy to bring online as many household appliances (think TIVO box). Today we released LOCKSS platform CD 243. To upgrade or to bring a LOCKSS box online, follow these instructions.
AnthroSource to be Archived on LOCKSS
January 19, 2007
AnthroSource is the premier online resource for anthropologists. Developed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and published by the University of California Press, AnthroSource brings 100 years of anthropological material online to scholars and the public. Read the announcement.
[edit] 2007
Podcast from CNI
December 18, 2006
Matt Pasiewicz of Educause interviewed David Rosenthal at CNI. You can listen to the podcast.
Presentation at CNI
December 5, 2006
Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal talked at the CNI meeting in Washington DC. Vicky gave an overview of the status of the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS programs, and David talked on Threats to Digital Preservation building on the threat model described in our Nov. 2005 D-Lib paper.
New LOCKSS Plugin Tool
November 9, 2006
We are pleased to announce version 0.10.2 of the LOCKSS Plugin Tool, an updated version of our helper application for LOCKSS plugin writers. The LOCKSS Plugin Tool is a graphical Java program that enables plugin writers to build simple LOCKSS plugins interactively.
Alabama Academic Libraries (NAAL) receive IMLS grant to build a private LOCKSS network!
October 4, 2006
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a two year National Leadership Grant to Auburn and six other Alabama universities. Titled the "Alabama Digital Preservation Network" these seven partners will use to a Private LOCKSS Network to build a low-cost statewide-distributed archival network. The Alabama Digital Preservation Network will preserve locally created digital assets and will demonstrate a preservation and access solution for academic institutions, state agencies, and community cultural heritage organizations. Aaron Trehub, Director of library technology, Auburn University is the project director. The participating institutions are the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Auburn University, Spring Hill College, Troy University, the University of Alabama, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of North Alabama.
The UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme
September 25, 2006
The JISC/CURL funded LOCKSS initiative in the British Isles directly engages a number of selected UK HE institutions. This article describes the rationale to establish the pilot programme, the aims and objectives and, in detail, the individual components of the programme.
New LOCKSS Plugin Tool
September 19, 2006
We are pleased to announce version 0.9.3 of the LOCKSS Plugin Tool, an updated version of our helper application for LOCKSS plugin writers. The LOCKSS Plugin Tool is a graphical Java program that enables plugin writers to build simple LOCKSS plugins interactively. The Plugin Tool Tutorial now has its own page.
Improved Protocol
August 4, 2006
The LOCKSS Program is rolling out a greatly improved polling and auditing protocol called LCAP V3. V3 is the result of a 4-year effort funded in part by a major grant from the National Science Foundation and involving more than a dozen researchers from the labs of Sun Microsystems, Intel and HP, and the Computer Science departments of Stanford and Harvard. You can find many publications describing aspects of this award-winning effort. V3 provides user-visible advantages including: Versioning (preserve content with multiple versions); Security (highly resistant to attack); Efficiency (preserve more content); Flexibility (preserve diverse genres).
New LOCKSS Plugin Tool
July 13, 2006
Today the Stanford LOCKSS Team released version 0.8.6 of the LOCKSS Plugin Tool, an updated version of our helper application for LOCKSS plugin writers. The LOCKSS Plugin Tool is a graphical Java program that enables plugin writers to build simple LOCKSS plugins interactively.
Michael Seadle's must read article
June 29, 2006
A Social Model for Archiving Digital Serials: LOCKSS (doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2006.03.007) Digital archiving inherited a vocabulary from the archiving of physical objects, but the social organization needed for effective digital archiving does not mirror the trusted-institution model used for physical archiving.
OCLC joins LOCKSS Alliance
June 23, 2006
OCLC joins the LOCKSS Alliance in support of its collaborative effort to explore new uses of the LOCKSS technology to benefit the community and to build new capabilities for digital preservation. OCLC will work collaboratively with LOCKSS to explore the expansion of the LOCKSS technology to operate with different types of digital content. Press Release
Library of Congress Digital Preservation Award
June 7, 2006
The Library of Congress NDIIPP has entered into a three-year cooperative agreement with Stanford University in support of the CLOCKSS digital archive pilot and related technical projects. Press Release
New LOCKSS Platform
May 30, 2006
Today the Stanford LOCKSS team released a new version of the LOCKSS Platform (CD230). The software is free and easy to install. See Installing LOCKSS for instructions and software. Nearly 145 LOCKSS boxes are running worldwide -- join us!
Against the Grain
May 25, 2006
Against the Grain interviews Victoria Reich about a number of topics including data reliabiliy, archive sustainability, and digital preservation threats in the April 2006 issue.
LOCKSS Card 2006
May 1, 2007
LOCKSS Card 2006 will be available during May and June. In early July it will disappear from the web and will only be available from LOCKSS boxes that captured and preserved the content while it was available from the publisher. The LOCKSS Card 2006 demonstrates that the system is format agnostic. We are proud to highlight a number of important community projects that are using the LOCKSS software to preserve a wide variety of genres. --- UPDATE (7/6/06) The LOCKSS Card is now offline.
A Fresh Look at the Reliability of Long-term Digital Storage
April 24, 2006
A peer reviewed computer science research paper published in Proceedings of EuroSys, April 2006. Thank you to Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Intel Research Laboratories, Stanford University Computer Science Department, and Harvard University Computer Science Department for supporting the research team's outstanding work.
Presentation
April 24, 2006
An excellent introduction to the LOCKSS Program by Wally Grotophorst, George Mason University.
New LOCKSS Website!
April 18, 2006
The LOCKSS Program's website gets a makeover! Our new publishing platform allows us to provide you information more quickly and features a search box on every page. Let us know what you think! Send your feedback to 
.
RLG DigNews Interview with Victoria Reich:
February 15, 2006
Questions you would ask; answers to those questions.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large ISSN 1534-0937 “Editors’ interview with Victoria Reich, director, LOCKSS program,” RLG DigiNews 10:1, February 15, 2006.
Want to keep up with LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)? (If you care about long-term access to digital journal collections, you should want to maintain awareness of LOCKSS.) Then go read this sevenpage interview—and, frankly, if you’re interested in digital preservation, you should be reading RLG DigiNews on a regular basis anyway. (No full disclosure required: I work for RLG, but have no connection with RLG DigiNews, which is written by staff at Cornell University Library in any case.) It’s free, it’s online, it’s concise, and it has great stuff.
This particular great stuff updates the concepts behind LOCKSS, the state of the LOCKSS alliance (launched in 2005), and the new CLOCKSS initiative (“C” for Controlled), “designed to test the feasibility of a large, community-managed dark archive.”
I won’t attempt to summarize. There’s a lot of information here, tersely presented: the bases for LOCKSS policies and procedures, relationships with publishers, how the LOCKSS polling process works, how much redundancy is needed and desired, the costs of an institutional “LOCKSS box” (one that’s being evaluated is a $3,500 unit with two terabytes of storage—“far less powerful” than a typical desktop or laptop PC, but with loads of storage space and enough computational power to handle LOCKSS requirements), and more. Seriously good stuff.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
February 3, 2006
Virginia Tech is developing a proof of concept for “Preservation and harvesting of international Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) using LOCKSS software and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)”. Partner institutions include: Germany (Humboldt-Universität), Brazil (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro), and South Africa (University of Cape Town). This work further extends the accomplishments of the ASERL LOCKSS ETD project. For further information, please contact Gail McMillan [gailmac at vt dot edu] or Kamini Santhanagopalan [kamini at vt dot edu].
CLOCKSS Project
January 23, 2006
A group of publishers, librarians, and learned societies have launched a community initiative employing the LOCKSS technology to support a large dark archive that serves as a failsafe repository for published scholarly content. Controlled LOCKSS (CLOCKSS), aims to provide assurance to the research community that a disaster, which would prevent the delivery of content, will not obstruct access to journal content. CLOCKSS content or the orphaned content would only become available after a trigger event, such as the material was no longer available from the publisher. In these situations, a joint advisory board, representing societies, publishers and libraries, will begin the process to determine if the content is orphaned and whether it should be made publicly available. The board ensures that content is controlled but that no one person or sector has authority over orphaned digital materials in the system. The initial two-year pilot includes research libraries, commercial and society publishers. During this time, publishers and libraries will continue to work closely to collect and analyze data and develop a proposal for a full-scale archiving model. As part of a longer-term strategy to permanently preserve published work, CLOCKSS will report the findings to the wider community and begin the dialogue about a global infrastructure to ensure preservation of all past, present, and future digital scholarly content.
Alaska State Documents
January 23, 2006
The Alaska State Library and the LOCKSS Alliance have joined together to provide a demonstration project for digital deposit of Alaska State Publications. Alaska State documents are now available for preservation on the LOCKSS system. For more information, please contact Daniel Cornwall [dan_cornwall at eed dot state dot ak dot us].
Fugitive U.S. Government Information
January 11, 2006
A group of LOCKSS Alliance participants has joined together on a project to preserve and provide access to fugitive government information via the LOCKSS network. By fugitive we mean government information that was not disseminated through the Federal Depository Library Program. Our first publications for this project are located on the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy website. In conjunction with the Director, Steven Aftergood, the LOCKSS team is preserving the valuable government information from this site via the LOCKSS network. You can see the type of information to be preserved at http://fas.org/sgp/ under the "Documents" heading. The following libraries are currently participating in this project: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dartmouth College, Georgia Tech, University of Iowa, Columbia University, University of Kentucky, Rice University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University and North Carolina State University. We are currently looking into other titles to preserve and would welcome your input. As always we welcome libraries to join the LOCKSS Alliance and participate in this exciting work. Please contact Elizabeth Cowell [cowell at stanford dot edu] if you have any questions or suggestions.
[edit] 2005
Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems: A Bottom-Up Approach
December 5, 2005
The field of digital preservation is being defined by a set of standards developed top-down, starting with an abstract reference model (OAIS) and gradually adding more specific detail. Systems claiming conformance to these standards are entering production use. Work is underway to certify that systems conform to requirements derived from OAIS. We complement these requirements derived top-down by presenting an alternate, bottom-up view of the field. The fundamental goal of these systems is to ensure that the information they contain remains accessible for the long term. We develop a parallel set of requirements based on observations of how existing systems handle this task, and on an analysis of the threats to achieving the goal. On this basis we suggest disclosures that systems should provide as to how they satisfy their goals. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/rosenthal/11rosenthal.html (D-Lib Magazine, November 2005, Volume 11 Number 11)
JISC issues call to preserve online journals
November 1, 2005
Access to entire back runs of electronic journals could be lost to educational institutions when subscriptions are cancelled or when journals cease publication. Because libraries can only lease access to electronic journals, in contrast to their print equivalents, their assets are at risk and valuable online content is in danger of being lost. JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), in partnership with CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles), today issued a call to librarians and publishers to meet these challenges together. An extended pilot will see the LOCKSS system, devised at Stanford University, deployed in selected libraries in the UK from January 2006. For further information on the LOCKSS Alliance UK partnership, please see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=lockss_townmeeting
LOCKSS Alliance grows to 50 participants
October 27, 2005
The LOCKSS Alliance has more than 50 academic library participants in the United States. "The idea of LOCKSS is to be of, by, and for the library community," Stanford University Librarian Mike Keller said. "It is extremely gratifying to us that the library community has responded so affirmatively in supporting the LOCKSS Alliance." http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/2005/pr-lockss-110205.html
Oxford University Press
October 20, 2005
Oxford Journals is delighted to announce that it is has begun to preserve its content in Stanford University's LOCKSS Programme.
BLOG!
September 14, 2005
Scott Matheson, Yale law librarian is blogging the GPO/LOCKSS pilot project! Scott's blog provides an excellent accounting of Scott's experiences with the LOCKSS system and tracks the GPO/LOCKSS pilot project's progress.
A Fresh Look at the Reliability of Long-term Digital Storage (technical report, work in progress)
August 5, 2005
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0508130 Many emerging Web services, such as email, photo sharing, and web site archives, need to preserve large amounts of quickly-accessible data indefinitely into the future. In this paper, we make the case that these applications' demands on large scale storage systems over long time horizons require us to re-evaluate traditional storage system designs. We examine threats to long-lived data from an end-to-end perspective, taking into account not just hardware and software faults but also faults due to humans and organizations. We present a simple model of long-term storage failures that helps us reason about the various strategies for addressing these threats in a cost-effective manner. Using this model we show that the most important strategies for increasing the reliability of long-term storage are detecting latent faults quickly, automating fault repair to make it faster and cheaper, and increasing the independence of data replicas.
Institute of Physics Announcement
July 27, 2005
Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP) and LOCKSS are pleased to announce that the first of IOP's journal titles have been released for preservation via the LOCKSS system.
Preserving web content that's here today and gone tomorrow
April 12, 2005
In response to many requests for a simple demonstration of the capabilities of the LOCKSS system, we published the LOCKSS Winter 2005 Card. The Card contained a movie of the LOCKSS team, an excel spreadsheet, LOCKSS java software, and many other file formats. The card, was available during February and March at http://www.lockss.org/card/2005/february/. It has now disappeared from the web. Fortunately, most of the LOCKSS machines around the world collected and preserved it. The readers at these institutions have perpetual access to this content. This exercise demonstrated a number of important features of the LOCKSS system: Content remains visible after it disappears from the publisher; Access to preserved content is transparent - the Card will be visible at its original URL; The system is format agnostic - the Card includes a wide range of formats (HTML, PDF, Quicktime Movie, Microsoft Excel, gif, JPEG, XML, Java source, Java JAR files)
George Mason University's LOCKSS Program Presentation
January 18, 2005
Wally Grotophorst, Associate University Librarian presented the LOCKSS Program to George Washington University librarians on January 11, 2005. This Quicktime presentation is an excellent, entertaining introduction to the Program.
