Paul Evan Peters Award

Year	Awardee
2024	Tony Hey
2022	Paul Courant
2020	Francine Berman
2017	Herbert Van de Sompel
2014	Donald A.B. Lindberg
2011	Christine L. Borgman
2008	Daniel E. Atkins
2006	Paul Ginsparg
2004	Brewster Kahle
2002	Vinton Gray Cerf
2000	Tim Berners-Lee

It has just been announced that at the Spring 2025 Membership Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Milwaukee, WI April 7^th and 8^th, Vicky and I are to receive the Paul Evan Peters Award. The press release announcing the award is here.

Vicky and I are honored and astonished by this award. Honored because it is the premiere award in the field, and astonished because we left the field more than seven years ago to take up our new full-time career as grandparents. We are all the more astonished because we are not even eligible for the award; the rules clearly state that the "award will be granted to an individual".

You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Vicky and I are extremely grateful to the Association of Research Libraries, CNI and EDUCAUSE, who sponsor the award.

Original Logo

Part of the award is the opportunity to make an extended presentation to open the meeting. The text of our talk, entitled Lessons From LOCKSS, with links to the sources and information that appeared on slides but was not spoken, should appear here on April 7^th.

The work that the award recognizes was not ours alone, but the result of a decades-long effort by the entire LOCKSS team. It was made possible by support from the LOCKSS community and many others, including Michael Lesk then at NSF, Donald Waters then at the Mellon Foundation, the late Karen Hunter at Elsevier, Stanford's Michael Keller and CNI's Cliff Lynch.

A Prophet Of The Web

While doing the research for a future talk, I came across an obscure but impressively prophetic report entitled Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections that Cliff Lynch wrote for the federal Office of Technology Assessment in 1993, 32 years ago. I say "obscure" because it doesn't appear in Lynch's pre-1997 bibliography.

To give you some idea of the context in which it was written, unless you are over 70, it was more than half your life ago when in November 1989 Tim Berners-Lee's browser first accessed a page from his Web server. It was only about the same time that the first commercial, as opposed to research, Internet Service Providers started with the ARPANET being decommissioned the next year. Two years later, in December of 1991, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center put up the first US Web page. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee codified and extended the HTTP protocol he had earlier implemented. It would be another two years before Netscape became the first browser to support HTTPS. It would be two years after that before the ITEF approved HTTP/1.0 in RFC 1945. As you can see, Lynch was writing among the birth-pangs of the Web.

Although Lynch was insufficiently pessimistic, he got a lot of things exactly right. Below the fold I provide four out of many examples.

Storage Roundup

It is time for another roundup of topics in storage that have caught my eye recently. Below the fold I discuss the possible ending of the HAMR saga and various developments in archival storage technology.