The LOCKSS Program & CLOCKSS initiative

[Victoria Reich <vreich@stanford.edu>]

Dear friends,

In response to your questions and many recent conversations, the 
brief below addresses some of your inquiries about CLOCKSS and 
how it aligns with the LOCKSS Program. Please feel free to 
contact me for additional information.

Vicky Reich
Director LOCKSS Program
Stanford University Libraries

I. Background

A group of publishers, librarians, and learned societies launched 
an initiative employing the LOCKSS technology to support a 
community-managed "large dark archive" that serves as a failsafe 
repository for scholarly content. Controlled LOCKSS (CLOCKSS) 
aims to provide the global research and scholarly community 
perpetual access to journal content, for orphaned or abandoned 
content and in the event of a long-term business interruption.

II. Organization and Management of CLOCKSS Initiative

The CLOCKSS initiative is a community-managed membership 
organization of libraries and publishers that differs from the 
LOCKSS alliance. Libraries and publishers govern the CLOCKSS 
initiative as equal partners. One of the strengths of the CLOCKSS 
initiative is that all participating organizations have a long 
history of survival and members understand issues of long-term 
sustainability.

Libraries and Date Founded
Edinburgh University - 1582
Indiana University -1785
New York Public Library -1895
Rice University - 1912
Stanford University - 1891
University of Virginia - 1825

Publishers and Date Founded:
American Medical Association - 1847
American Physiological Society - 1887
Blackwell -1897
Nature Publishing Group - 1869
Oxford University Press, 1478
SAGE Publications - 1965
Springer - 1842
Taylor and Francis - 1798
John Wiley & Sons - 1807
Elsevier (which is participating in all discussions and is sharing in
financial support) - 1880

III. Differences between Content in LOCKSS and CLOCKSS

The main difference between the LOCKSS program and the CLOCKSS 
initiative is that LOCKSS provides a community approach to long 
term preservation of a library's local collections while CLOCKSS 
aims to provide a long-term global archiving solution that will 
serve the joint library and publisher communities in the event of 
a long-term business interruption or in making orphaned or 
abandoned works readily available to the scholarly community.

In LOCKSS, librarians use their LOCKSS boxes to collect and 
preserve the journal content locally that they subscribe to. With 
the publisher's permission, LOCKSS Alliance libraries no longer 
"just lease content". Publishers have control over which 
libraries take custody of what materials and when this occurs. 
Preserved materials are available to the local community when the 
publisher is not able to resolve a specific URL request.

In CLOCKSS, libraries preserve member publisher content they do 
subscribe to and content they don't subscribe to. CLOCKSS content 
would only be available after a "trigger" event, such as the 
material was no longer available from the publisher. In these 
situations, the publishers, librarians, and representing 
societies begin the collaborative process to determine whether 
materials should be made generally available to all for a limited 
or an indefinite period of time.

LOCKSS has a large number of participating libraries, it allows a 
library to locally preserve its own subscriptions. CLOCKSS has a 
limited number of library participants, as the dark archives will 
e held on behalf of the broader community.

IV. Technology and Funding

The CLOCKSS initiative uses the same robust technology 
underpinning the LOCKSS program. To develop this initial 
technology, the LOCKSS program was sponsored by a number of 
high-profile supporters, including the National Science 
Foundation, and The Andrew W. Mellon foundation. The LOCKSS 
Program has been built using award-winning computer science 
research supported by NSF, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard 
Laboratories, and Intel Laboratories as well as Stanford 
University's and Harvard University's Computer Science 
Departments. Ongoing support for the LOCKSS Program is also 
provided through LOCKSS Alliance membership fees.

The CLOCKSS member libraries and publishers are sharing CLOCKSS 
initiative expenses equally, which includes money for additional 
servers, support staff and development costs. All CLOCKSS 
participating libraries are also active members of the LOCKSS 
Alliance.

V. Future of CLOCKSS

The CLOCKSS partners intend to build an archiving model that will 
preserve all years of digitally available publisher member 
titles. After the two-year pilot, CLOCKSS will report the 
findings to the wider community.

CLOCKSS members are considering new publisher participants until 
April 28, 2006 [contact Vicky Reich, vreich@stanford.edu]. At 
present no additional libraries are being added to the pilot.

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