A thriving international community of digital preservation services built around LOCKSS open-source software - Digital Preservation Coalition

"LOCKSS stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”. Many people in the international digital preservation community will recognize this as the name of the open source preservation software developed at Stanford University Library. But did you know that LOCKSS is also shorthand for a community of varied distributed preservation services all operating on LOCKSS software? Sometimes called Private LOCKSS Networks or PLNs, these preservation services are: the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet), Cariniana in Brazil, CLOCKSS, the MetaArchive Cooperative, the Michigan Digital Preservation Network (MDPN), the SAFE Archive Federation serving 7 universities in Europe and Canada, the US Digital Federal Depository Library Program which preserves government documents published on the US govinfo site (USDOCS), the CGI Preservation Network in Canada, Perma.cc, the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN), and COPPUL’s WestVault. And just to make things a bit more confusing, it is also shorthand for the Global LOCKSS network which provides digital preservation services and a mechanism for building local collections of web-based scholarly open access publications in a wide array of academic libraries. The general model is the same for each service in this community of preservation: multiple geographically distributed preservation nodes run the LOCKSS software, each uses a crawler to obtain a copy of the target content for preservation, then these are stored on servers participating in the LOCKSS polling and voting protocol to establish consensus on the authenticity and integrity of that content. When one of these servers detects damage to its preserved copy, it fetches repairs from the original source or from a proven peer.   What varies greatly from one PLN to another are governance and policy matters: the users of the preservation network, the content that is in scope, who operates the service, who has access to the preserved content and under what circumstances, who provides financial backing for various kinds of costs, what services beyond preservation are provided (e.g. bibliographic metadata, usage reports, etc.)..."