Summit on Serials in the Digital Environment

THE LOCKSS PROGRAM

Victoria A. Reich

Libraries build collections to serve communities. They are an important memory organization. The web, while bringing many benefits has had a powerful negative impact on libraries: they are no longer able to easily and affordably build local collections. They lease feematerials and access free materials. This failure to collect digital artifacts will create a growing dark ageof our times.

"What is a library anymore anyway?" by Michael A. Keller, Victoria A. Reich, and Andrew C. Herkovic, First Monday, volume 8, number 5 (May 2003) at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_5/keller/index.html

LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Save) was developed to address this problem http://lockss.stanford.edu. LOCKSS open source software provides a peer to peer, distributed, persistent access preservation system for web delivered information. This easy to use, inexpensive to maintain system will be released for production in early 2004.

Brief description and goals http://lockss.stanford.edu/projectdescbrief.htm
Participating libraries and publishers http://lockss.stanford.edu/projectstatus.htm

Technology: The LOCKSS software turns a personal computer into a preservation tool by transforming it into persistent web cache. In 2004 one LOCKSS computer can hold approximately 2,800 years of an electronic journal at an average cost of 35 cents/journal/year. Given the historic growth of computer storage capacity, we predict that by 2007 one LOCKSS computer web cache will hold approximately 23,000 years of a journal at an average cost of 7 cents/journal/year. Libraries provide users access to LOCKSS preserved content by configuring the LOCKSS cache computer as a transparent proxy on their institutional network.

Brief technology overview http://lockss.stanford.edu/techoverview.html

Collections: What might librarians collect through the LOCKSS system? We suggest librarians consider owning rather than leasing electronic journals accessed through individual institution subscriptions or consortia licenses. We also suggest librarians consider coordinating collection efforts to collect and preserve important freely available electronic titles. Coordinated collected development efforts are underway for humanities literature http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eletrs/lockss, government documents http://lockss-docs.stanford.edu/ and other genres. The LOCKSS technology will provide persistent access to materials that are delivered through HTTP; published in serial; have a reasonably stable URL structure; have or can be made to have an authoritative version.

Collection development http://lockss.stanford.edu/collectionswork.html

Publisher must grant permission to the LOCKSS crawler before the system will collect copyrighted content. Permission must be granted for every individual titles archival unit(usually a volume) via a LOCKSS Publisher manifest web page. This manifest page can link to and bundle together content not routinely associated with the electronic journal (front matter, editorial instructions, and for example, the titles CONSER bibliographic record) for long term preservation in the LOCKSS system.

Publisher actions http://lockss.stanford.edu/publisheractions.html

Summary: LOCKSS is a working example of a distributed repository. We believe the major threat to successful long term preservation is budget cuts. A major advantage of a distributed repository model is that the cost of preserving content is shared among many participants. There is no central point of failure, neither technical nor budgetary.