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 archiving 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 (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of librarians who build collections and must ensure the future availability of today’s intellectual, cultural and historical content.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 (www.lockss.org), 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 (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.
