Re: High Wire Press & LOCKSS research project

[Peter Graham <psgraham@syr.edu>]

Re:  LOCKSS

I want to know more about this proposed solution to archiving, but at
first blush, from the Chronicle article, there are several apparent
issues::

1) It doesn't deal with the archiving issues at all, it just makes
multiple copies and assumes that more copies means a single copy will last
significantly longer.  This is undemonstrated, and in the current
technological environment the burden of assertion is on the project.

2)  It makes no assumptions about technological transfer through time, or
migration, which is the real archiving problem, not singularity of copies;

3)  Redundancy in any worthy archiving system will be a desideratum for
just the reasons they claim, but redundancy of information prepared for
archiving, not unprepared information.

4)  The mutual checking of information back and forth is proposed as an
advantage, but as soon as technological migration begins to occur this
process must necessarily fail, as the "files" won't look alike
technically.

5)  Cliff Lynch has raised interesting questions about what the "canonical
form" of a document/object might be, and this project blocks that issue by
assuming there can only be one form.

On the other hand, it's clear that there will be many roads to Rome, and
the redundancy issues proposed here are worth testing.  (The idea of 6
sites doesn't seem too redundant to me at all; in fact they aren't
redundant enough, being in the same geographic continent and political
regime, but presumably that can be dealt with after the test.)  --pg

Peter Graham    Syracuse University Library    psgraham@syr.edu
Syracuse NY 13244-2010 315/443-5530 fax 315/443-2060 11/99nw4.4

____________________


Ann Okerson wrote:

> For liblicense-l readers who may not have seen it, this is a piece about
> the HighWire group's proposed pereptual access solution for ejournals.
> Comments?  Is this an option you'd want to introduce into your e-licenses?
>
> The Moderators
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Today's Chronicle of HE
>
> Stanford Project to Test Method for Preserving Digital Journals
>
> By SCOTT CARLSON
>
> To assuage fears about the permanence of articles published in electronic
> journals, Stanford University researchers will test a computerized
> variation on an age-old archiving strategy: Make lots of copies, and keep
> them in different locations.
>
> Stanford's HighWire Press, which offers more than 170 scholarly journals
> online, announced last week that it would test the approach this spring,
> in a project called Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, or LOCKSS. [....]