Enhancing the LOCKSS Technology

A paper entitled Enhancing the LOCKSS Digital Preservation Technology describing work we did with funding from the Mellon Foundation has appeared in the September/October issue of D-Lib Magazine. The abstract is:

The LOCKSS Program develops and supports libraries using open source peer-to-peer digital preservation software. Although initial development and deployment was funded by grants including from NSF and the Mellon Foundation, grant funding is not a sustainable basis for long-term preservation. The LOCKSS Program runs the "Red Hat" model of free, open source software and paid support. From 2007 through 2012 the program was in the black with no grant funds at all.

The demands of the "Red Hat" model make it hard to devote development resources to enhancements that don't address immediate user demands but are targeted at longer-term issues. After discussing this issue with the Mellon Foundation, the LOCKSS Program was awarded a grant to cover a specific set of infrastructure enhancements. It made significant functional and performance improvements to the LOCKSS software in the areas of ingest, preservation and dissemination. The LOCKSS Program's experience shows that the "Red Hat" model is a viable basis for long-term digital preservation, but that it may need to be supplemented by occasional small grants targeted at longer-term issues.

Among the enhancements described in the paper are implementations of Memento (RFC7089) and Shibboleth, support for crawling sites that use AJAX, and some significant enhancements to the LOCKSS peer-to-peer polling protocol.