Establishing a community-based approach to electronic journal archiving: the UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme

Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS ) represents a sophisticated combination of technical and business-aware elements that can be deployed to ensure the long-term accessibility to electronic journal content even if the publisher ceases to exist, a subscription is terminated, or the already acquired content becomes damaged. Given the potential benefits of LOCKSS to the UK community, and in consideration of the implications of the NESLi2 licences, the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (JISC/CURL) co-funded a UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme to explore issues associated with the practical implementation of LOCKSS in UK Higher Education institutions. The pilot launched in March 2006 and concluded in July 2008. Following on from our experiences throughout the UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme, this paper discusses the organizational attributes of the LOCKSS approach that we expect to further develop in the UK, describes the types of journal content that the current generation of LOCKSS seems best suited to handle and as a result how LOCKSS may fit into the broader journal archiving environment, and it describes the steps we are taking to ensure both the LOCKSS software and Technical Support Service grow effectively to support library use and information management