About LOCKSS
LOCKSS is an international community-based archiving initiative led by Stanford University in the USA, with over 170 member libraries worldwide and archiving content from over 300 publishers. Libraries deploy open-source software in a geographically-distributed archive in order to enable longevity, giving them control over their own archived content. The emphasis is on low cost and low maintenance.
Starting in March 2006, JISC and the Consortium of Research Libraries (now RLUK) carried out a two year pilot establishing the UK LOCKSS Alliance, with a Technical Support Service based in HATII at the University of Glasgow on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). That technical advice and general support for the UK LOCKSS Alliance will continue from August 2008, based at EDINA working together with the DCC.
The UK LOCKSS pilot has been innovative as the first non-US country-wide LOCKSS archive network. The evaluation undertaken by Evidence Base of the JISC/UK LOCKSS Pilot concludes that "UK LOCKSS pilot project had achieved its overall aim of setting up a UK LOCKSS Alliance of 30 HE libraries". (A further six had joined the original 24 institutions.)
A Comparative Study of e Journal Archiving Solutions by Morrow et al when referring to the strengths of LOCKSS as an archiving solution, pointed out that it is "a closer analogue to paper distribution than any of the other solutions".
Further information
How to join the UK LOCKSS Alliance
In order to subscribe to LOCKSS by visiting our Catalogue.
