Clockss Ticking On Digital Preservation

Not a moment too soon, libraries, universities, and publishers across the globe have flicked the switch on a collaborative digital archiving project that promises to preserve important scholarly content forever.

Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation, a journal from SAGE Publications, just went out of print and has moved years of its online content to the community managed Controlled LOCKSS archive. The archive uses the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe open-source technology developed by Stanford University and is geographically dispersed across nodes at universities from Edinburgh to Virginia.

It’s a long-term global archiving project that will serve the joint library and publisher communities in the event of a natural disaster and make orphaned or abandoned works readily available to the general public, for free.

CLOCKSS sheds some light on how businesses might start to think about preserving important intellectual property, maintaining authenticity of records, and managing long-term archives. For IT infrastructure and Ops professionals tasked with building and managing long-term archives and plagued with vendor lock-in, high upfront cost,s and ongoing maintenance fees, this open-architecture offers a glimpse of how to build a massively scalable, online archive, without these headaches.

By Jo Maitland