LOCKSS Alliance Achieves Membership Milestone

[Victoria Reich <vreich@stanford.edu>]

LOCKSS Alliance Achieves Membership Milestone - http://www.lockss.org/

By Andrew Herkovic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Stanford California. The LOCKSS Alliance announced
today that it has 50 academic library members in the United States.

Begun in 1998 as a collaboration between librarians and software
engineers, LOCKSS (for "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") pioneered an
innovative and now proven means of harnessing the Internet to assure the
persistence of important, expensive, and at-risk digital content, such as
scientific journal content, for libraries. Developed largely with grant
funds, LOCKSS is open source software that provides librarians with an
easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access
to their own, local copy of authorized content they purchase.

In late 2004 the LOCKSS Alliance, a membership organization dedicated to
the support and growth of the LOCKSS system, was announced. Community
support grew quickly, and as of today 50 U.S. libraries have joined this
initiative. Libraries support the LOCKSS Alliance because it is the only
open-source, membership-driven digital preservation system with
participation from both commercial and non-profit scholarly publishers.  
In addition, the LOCKSS system is flexible and extensible.� Projects are
underway to use the system to preserve a wide variety of materials
(scholarly electronic journals, government documents, electronic thesis
and dissertations, and special and archival materials).

Stanford University Librarian Mike Keller stated, "The idea of LOCKSS is
to be of, by, and for the library community. It is extremely gratifying to
us that the library community has responded so affirmatively in supporting
the LOCKSS Alliance." Added Keller, "It is critical to note the role of
publishers in the design and adoption of the LOCKSS methodology, so this
is really about bringing the two communities together."

Since 530BC libraries have built and cared for local collections of today's 
materials for tomorrow's scholars. The pioneering 50 libraries in the 
LOCKSS Alliance are showing the way this role for libraries as society's 
memory organization can continue into the digital age.

LOCKSS is an initiative of the Stanford University Libraries and Academic
Information Resources. While serving as the primary provider of both
information and information technology services to students and faculty,
this organization is also a leading player in the global publishing and
scholarly communication industry through its subsidiaries the HighWire
Press and the Stanford University Press. The LOCKSS program is an integral
outgrowth of Stanford's direct engagement as both producer and consumer of
scholarly information.

Andrew Herkovic is communications director for the Stanford University 
Libraries and Academic Information Resources
CONTACT: Victoria Reich, Director LOCKSS Program, 650 725 1134, 
info@lockss.org

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