Duke U. Press Joins LOCKSS

An announcment from Duke University Press & Duke Libraries, care of Kimberly Steinle:

For immediate release: Nov. 8, 2006

CONTACT: Mandy Dailey-Berman (Duke University Press, Journals Publicity  Coordinator)
mdberman@dukeupress.edu

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, DUKE LIBRARIES TO SUPPORT LONG-TERM STRATEGIES  FOR PRESERVING ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY JOURNAL CONTENT

DURHAM, N.C. — Duke University Press and Duke University Libraries will  be participating in Portico and the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Alliance, two long-term strategies to preserve electronic scholarly journal content for future scholars, school officials announced Wednesday.

“The mandate to preserve scholarly work is an implicit and critical component of a library’s mission and one that has been vastly complicated by both the shift to electronic publishing and the fiscal challenges that libraries now face,” says Kimberly Steinle, Duke University Press’s library relations manager. “Portico and LOCKSS offer libraries reliable solutions to these problems, securing perpetual access to archived online content, while also eliminating the financial burden of creating an archive.”

Kevin L. Smith, scholarly communication officer at Duke, adds, “We recognize that academic research libraries such as those here at Duke University need to invest in digital repositories that help scholars maintain access to and control of their research product at various stages. Both LOCKSS and Portico represent substantive progress on the broad issue of electronic archiving.”

Portico was launched in 2005 with support from JSTOR, Ithaka, the Library of Congress and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Portico’s mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that it remains accessible to future generations of
scholars, researchers, and students. In pursuit of this mission, Portico operates a secure, permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.  To date, more than 5,200 journals have been promised to the Portico archive, and a broad range of scholarly publishers and libraries have chosen to participate in Portico as an important component of their archiving strategy.

Initiated by Stanford University Libraries, LOCKSS is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to the local copy of authorized content they purchase. Running on standard desktop hardware and requiring almost no technical administration, LOCKSS provides accessible copies of e-journal content as it is published.

You can take a look at what LOCKSS is planning here.  Portico’s got the same basic idea, but there are differences, so take at look at them, too.