CLOCKSS

Library of Congress Announces Digital Preservation Award to Stanford
University

The Library of Congress has entered into a three-year cooperative
agreement with Stanford University to provide approximately $700,000
in support of Stanford's CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep
Stuff Safe) digital archive pilot and related technical projects.
Funding is being provided by the congressionally mandated National
Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
(NDIIPP).

   "We are looking forward to working with Stanford on this
    important collaboration," said Laura E. Campbell, associate
    librarian for Strategic Initiatives, who is leading NDIIPP. "By
    joining our other NDIIPP digital preservation partners, Stanford
    is leveraging the collective expertise in this important field
    of librarianship."

The Library is leading the NDIIPP initiative
<URL:http://www.digitalpreservation.gov>, which is focused on the
long-term preservation of culturally important born-digital
materials. A key element of this program is the formation of a
national network of partners, like Stanford, to implement solutions
and share responsibility for preserving digital materials.

Since 1999, Stanford has been developing preservation software as
part of its LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program.

Web sites have become the version of record for many journals and
other types of publications that are no longer distributed in print.
Information stored on paper can survive for centuries; information
stored digitally today may not be recoverable next week. Libraries
are thus faced with the urgent problem of creating online
collections that are as well preserved as traditional hard copies.
The reliable preservation of digital materials is critical to the
mission of librarians who build collections and must ensure the
future availability of today's intellectual, cultural and historical
content.

The LOCKSS Program, initiated by Stanford University Libraries, is
open-source software that provides libraries with an easy and
inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve and provide access to
their own, local copy of authorized content. The CLOCKSS initiative
(<URL:http://www.lockss.org/clockss>) is a collaborative, community
initiative to build a trusted, large-scale, dark archive. CLOCKSS is
intended to provide a decentralized and secure solution to long-term
archiving, based on the LOCKSS technical infrastructure. Its
governance and administration structure are distributed to ensure
that no single organization controls the archive or has the power to
compromise the content's long-term safety or integrity. Access to
archived content will be granted in response to a trigger event (for
example, when content is orphaned or abandoned by its owner or
subject to long-term business interruption), reviewed by a group of
people working on behalf of the broader community. Any content that
is made accessible after a trigger event will be made available to
all.

As part of the NDIIPP cooperative agreement, Stanford will work with
the Library of Congress to explore the potential applicability of
its LOCKSS/ CLOCKSS technologies to a variety of initiatives and
projects that support the overall goals of NDIIPP. The Library award
will be matched dollar-for-dollar by Stanford.

The LOCKSS Program <URL:http://www.lockss.org> is based at Stanford
University Libraries and Academic Information Resources
<URL:www-sul.stanford.edu>.  Over the years, the program has
received major funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the
National Science Foundation, as well as funding and in-kind support
from the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee, Sun
Microsystems, HP Labs, Intel Research Berkeley and Harvard
University. The program is now largely funded by contributions from
the member libraries of the LOCKSS Alliance.


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 19:59
                 Distributed: Wednesday, June 14, 2006
                       Message Id: cdl-19-59-002
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