Vicky Reich
Director of LOCKSS Project
Stanford University
David S.H. Rosenthal
Distinguished Engineer
Sun Microsystems
The transitory nature of web content is a fact of digital life that affects everyone. How can you find documents posted by publishers who are now defunct? How can you protect archived publications from hazards such as fires, floods, or human error? How can you ensure interested (and authorized) readers will find your published materials? Ensuring continuous access to online scientific journals and other web documents is the focus of a unique collaboration between Sun Microsystems Laboratories’ David Rosenthal and Stanford University Library’s Vicky Reich. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) provides a strategy for long-term preservation by systematically caching content in a self- correcting P2P network. This project, midway through the beta testing of the LOCKSS software, enables libraries to maintain high integrity persistent caches of electronic journal content to which they have subscribed. The briefing session will concentrate on lessons learned from the beta test to date and outline steps to take the software to production.