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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 member. 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).

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 member 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 members 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.

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.

20 TO WATCH IN 2006

February 6, 2006

EPS Focus Report: 01/12/2005

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 members 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.

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 members

October 27, 2005

The LOCKSS Alliance has more than 50 academic library members 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.