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Dear All, The recent post from the CLOCKSS initiative (see below) concerning their approach to Digital Preservation has got me thinking. There has been a lot of excellent work done by, for example, the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Digital Curation Centre, looking at strategies and technologies for selection and preservation. There have been funded projects and Europe-wide initiatives establishing repositories and trigger events. It all seems like an awful lot of hard work, and if life teaches us anything it's that people have a way of regarding hard work as damage and routing around it. I think we all know the best practice orthodoxy of planning for preservation, implementing organisation-wide and end-to-end platforms and processes. But is anyone on this list actually doing all of this stuff as a regular, non-funded, core part of the way you run your organisation and its services? Are all of the staff in your organisation aware of the pressing need to preserve born-digital material, or to implement naming conventions and format policies consistently? The reason I ask is that I suspect there is a growing divergence between Digital Preservation theory and practice, and particularly between the library, museum and archive communities. If this is, indeed the case, why is it? Is it that the ideal of Digital Preservation is simply economically and organisationally unattainable, and if this is the case, should we be softening the requirement to something more pragmatic? And finally, if we do, how do we feel about accepting that some things just aren't worth preserving - even if our children's children curse us for it in 50 years time? I would welcome any and all thoughts on whether Digital Preservation is a pipe dream or a practicality! Merry Christmas, Nick Nick Poole Chief Executive MDA www.mda.org.uk www.collectionslink.org.uk Tel: 01223 316028 Fax: 01223 364658 MDA (Europe) Ltd: Company Registration No: 1300565 Reg. Office: 22 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 1JP. -----Original Message----- From: Digital-Preservation Announcement and Information List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Amy Kohrman Sent: 20 December 2007 20:45 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: How CLOCKSS Works: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Content The CLOCKSS initiative is a partnership of libraries and publishers committed to ensuring long-term access to scholarly work in digital format. As more and more content moves online, there is growing concern that this digital content may not always be available. CLOCKSS addresses this problem by creating a secure, multi-sited archive of web-published content that can be tapped into as necessary to provide ongoing access to researchers worldwide *for free*. There are many ways digital content may become unavailable, including when a publisher chooses to retire a journal. SAGE Publications, a CLOCKSS partner, recently announced that it would discontinue online access to its journal, "Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation." This represents an opportunity to demonstrate how CLOCKSS responds to a "trigger event." Building on the recent Pilot project, CLOCKSS publishers will feed digital content, including the journal "Graft," into a distributed archive housed at seven sites around the globe. When content ceases to be available, for whatever reason, and for an agreed lapse of time, a "trigger event" is judged by the CLOCKSS Board to have occurred. Content stored in the archive is released to designated delivery platforms or hosts, ensuring unrestricted access to research literature that might otherwise have been lost. The current CLOCKSS Board, established in 2005 to oversee the Pilot, includes executives from the world's leading publishers -- responsible for about 60% of journal content currently online -- and representatives from six leading libraries and OCLC. Together they have developed a network of geographically-diverse CLOCKSS archive sites. The sites maintain "CLOCKSS boxes," computers with storage to hold and preserve multiple copies of content from the participating publishers. These geographically-dispersed copies are under different administrative control and are continually and automatically audited against one another. These copies remain "dark," hidden and unavailable for use, until a trigger event leads the CLOCKSS Board to "light up" the content and restore access to it again. Negotiations are underway to expand the CLOCKSS archive network to 12 to 15 libraries. CLOCKSS is actively recruiting additional publishers and libraries to join the initiative. For information on joining CLOCKSS, please visit http://www.clockss.org or contact [log in to unmask] In June 2007 CLOCKSS was the inaugural winner of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) Outstanding Collaboration Citation, which recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials. The ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association. The CLOCKSS initiative is funded by participating publishers and library organizations, as well as by a grant from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) via the U.S. Library of Congress. The grant is intended to finance CLOCKSS through a mixture of ingest fees from publishers and revenue from an endowment raised from voluntary contributions over the next five years. The need to secure long-term sustainable funding for CLOCKSS will be one of the key strategic issues facing the Board in 2008. For more information about the CLOCKSS initiative, please visit http://www.clockss.org or contact [log in to unmask] for information. See also, http://www.clockss.org/clockss/News_Archive for background information. Participating Libraries in Pilot: Indiana University, New York Public Library, OCLC, Rice University, Stanford University, University of Edinburgh, and University of Virginia Participating Publishers in Pilot: American Chemical Society, American Medical Association, American Physiological Society, Elsevier, IOP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell Amy Kohrman Marketing Manager LOCKSS/CLOCKSS Stanford University Libraries 1450 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 [log in to unmask] ************************************************** For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk **************************************************