CLOCKSS

Two More Scholarly Journals are Now Available Open Access

Matt Smithers — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:25:12 +0000

In its ongoing mission to preserve and share the scholarly record, the CLOCKSS Archive has recently triggered two academic journals that are now freely accessible to everyone. When content in the archive is no longer available from any publisher, CLOCKSS makes it publicly and permanently available under open access terms. (https://clockss.org/triggered-content/)

Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies - The Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies has been preserved and triggered for open access through CLOCKSS. This journal explores rich and diverse topics within African archaeology, anthropology, heritage theory, sustainable development, museum studies, and related fields. It was published by White Rose University Press and indexed through major scholarly services, and its archives now include all volumes from its run. Authors retained copyright with Creative Commons licensing, supporting broad reuse of the scholarship. (https://clockss.org/triggered-content/journal-of-african-cultural-heritage-studies/).

This is an important resource for researchers, students, and heritage practitioners interested in African perspectives on cultural heritage, critical historical inquiry, and localized heritage philosophies that have often been under‑represented in global scholarship.

Journal of Critical Southern Studies - Also now openly accessible is the Journal of Critical Southern Studies. Archived in the CLOCKSS collection, this journal focused on scholarship from and about the Global South, addressing questions of knowledge production, power structures, and alternative ways of understanding historical and social realities. (https://clockss.org/triggered-content/journal-of-critical-southern-studies/).

The journal’s volumes are now available under a Creative Commons license, helping ensure that voices from critical Southern studies remain discoverable and usable by scholars worldwide, even after formal publication has ceased.

Both journals represent scholarly contributions that might otherwise have become difficult to access due to changes in publishing status.

CLOCKSS’s trigger mechanism preserves and liberates such content when it becomes unavailable through traditional channels, ensuring that research remains part of the global knowledge ecosystem.

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Towards a Global Resilient Information Network

Matt Smithers — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:20:52 +0000

In a complex world, we stand for shared digital stewardship of assets of culture and knowledge across time and space.

Access to culture and knowledge is a cornerstone of democracy and human rights. For generations, libraries, archives, museums, and related institutions have acted as stewards of this shared inheritance. Today, that institutional responsibility is under increasing strain.

We live in a period of profound instability. Armed conflict, geopolitical fragmentation, and the strategic use of disinformation erode trust at societal scale. Climate change disrupts the environmental and institutional conditions on which preservation depends. At the same time, the digital domain - on which so much of contemporary culture and knowledge now rests - has become a concentrated site of risk.

Digital systems enable unprecedented access and participation, and introduce new vulnerabilities. Cyberattacks have undermined institutional credibility and taken collections of global importance offline. Platform dependence and vendor lock-in increasingly shape what can be preserved and how. Rapid technological change renders organisations outdated at speed, while algorithmic systems steer attention according to the values and interests of economic actors. At the same time, economic concentration and (geo)political pressure challenge digital sovereignty and trust.

In this environment, cultural loss is accelerating: data disappears, metadata is severed from context, access collapses even when bits survive, and algorithms increasingly determine what is visible, valued, or forgotten.

These active climate, (geo)political, and digital threats compound existing institutional challenges such as funding volatility, cross-border legal fragmentation, and skills shortages. Together, they indicate the widening gap between what digital stewardship in the 21st century demands and what existing institutional models can reliably provide.

In January 2026, an international group of institutional leaders, researchers, and policy thinkers met in the Netherlands to explore these fundamental challenges, convening around the possibility of a Global Resilient Information Network (GRIN) conceived as a path through these pressing issues. Global acknowledges that these challenges must transcend regional boundaries. Resilience emphasises the capacity required to absorb shocks, adapt, and recover while preserving core functions. Information networks provide the redundancy, connectivity, and reach needed to extend beyond any single institution or location.

The group agreed on a statement of intent: “In a complex world, we stand for shared digital stewardship of assets of culture and knowledge across time and space”.

By shared, we recognise that no single institution, sector, or nation can respond adequately on its own. Data may survive while access fails; the loss of context, connection, or trust can be as damaging as the loss of the data itself. Trusted networks matter as much as trusted repositories, and institutional backup alone is insufficient. Stewardship is inherently distributed - carried out by multiple institutions, communities, and individuals, formal and informal, connected across boundaries.

By digital, we acknowledge that while assets of culture and knowledge exist in many forms, the digital domain introduces distinct vulnerabilities and responsibilities. Addressing these risks requires forms of responsibility that differ fundamentally from those developed for physical collections.

By stewardship, we mean the responsible, long-term care of something held in trust for others, including future generations. It is not a single intervention, but an ongoing obligation to safeguard integrity, accessibility, and enduring value.

By assets of culture and knowledge, we refer to artefacts of human endeavour that create, store, share, and transmit meaning, memory, and understanding. We use assets to emphasise their material and infrastructural reality, and culture to avoid narrowing knowledge to a purely technical or academic domain.

By across time and space, we affirm that stewardship must operate simultaneously in the present and the long term - across years, decades, and centuries - and at local, regional, national, and global scales.

From the discussions, it is clear that resilience does not arise from uniformity or centralisation. It emerges through connection: between people, institutions, communities and systems; through coordinated use of existing infrastructure, skills, and knowledge; and through diversity of approaches combined with mutual reliance. Stewardship must therefore extend beyond individual organisational mandates, since no institution can adequately respond to these challenges in isolation.

This statement sets out the case as we now understand it for the conditions we face and the responsibilities we share. Our vision is of digital stewardship as a collective, value-driven practice. If this resonates with you, if you are grappling with similar questions, or if you see connections between GRIN and your own work, we welcome conversation and exchange. The KB National Library of the Netherlands, as convener of the Global Resilient Information Network, serves as a point of contact.

GRIN Conference attendees
Alicia Wise - CLOCKSS
Elsbeth Kwant - KB National Library
Frank Scholze -German National Library
George Oates - The Flickr Foundation
Harry Verwayen -Europeana Foundation
Herbert Van de Sompel - DANS
Jeff Ubois - Internet Archive Europe
Martha Whitehead – Harvard Library
Martijn Kleppe- KB National Library
Michael Peter Edson - Independent
Paul Keller- Open Future
Saskia Scheltjens - Rijksmuseum
Sharon M. Leon - Digital Scholar
Thomas Padilla - University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
William Kilbride - Digital Preservation Coalition
Wilma van Wezenbeek - KB National Library

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Digital Preservation Is a Community Commitment

Matt Smithers — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:34:55 +0000

Digital preservation is often described as a technical challenge, but our recent webinar showed that it is much more than that. It is an ongoing commitment by institutions and communities to safeguard the scholarly and cultural record for future generations. The session brought together Dr. Luis Corujo, Professor at the University of Lisbon and co-author of Preservation and Digital Repositories: Connections, Possibilities, and Needs, and Dr. Alicia Wise, Executive Director of CLOCKSS. Their discussion explored how digital repositories, preservation strategies, and emerging technologies intersect, and why this work matters now more than ever.

A central theme of the conversation was the distinction between digital curation and digital preservation. Digital curation refers to the full lifecycle of digital materials, including their creation, organization, description, access, and reuse. Digital preservation focuses more specifically on ensuring that digital content remains usable, authentic, and accessible over time, even as software, hardware, and formats change. Preservation is not simply a matter of storing files. It requires careful planning, documentation, risk assessment, and an understanding of the communities that the repository serves. Institutions must decide what they are responsible for preserving, which materials are most critical, and how they will sustain access in the long term.

The speakers emphasized that preservation begins with policy and strategy rather than technology. Clear goals, defined roles, and documented decision-making processes are essential. Not every item can be preserved at the same level, and institutions must make thoughtful choices based on mission and uniqueness. Content that exists in only one place carries a higher level of responsibility and may require additional safeguards. Collaborative preservation networks such as APTrust in the United States and Cariniana in Brazil demonstrate how institutions can work together to reduce risk and share expertise. These partnerships strengthen resilience and ensure that preservation is not dependent on a single system or organization.

Another important point was the human dimension of preservation. Effective stewardship requires more than technical skill. Professionals in this field need cultural awareness, knowledge of metadata and information organization, and the ability to interpret materials whose context may not be immediately clear. They must also adapt continually as technologies evolve. Preservation is sustained by people who understand both the technical and intellectual value of the materials they manage. It is a collective effort grounded in professional judgment and shared responsibility.

The discussion also addressed the growing influence of artificial intelligence. AI can support preservation work by assisting with metadata generation and large-scale analysis, but it also raises new challenges. Questions of authorship, authenticity, and provenance become more complex when content is generated or transformed by AI systems. The speakers suggested that documenting how digital objects are created, modified, and processed may become increasingly important. Transparency and traceability will play a central role in maintaining trust in the scholarly record.

Equity and representation were highlighted as essential concerns. Decisions about what to collect and preserve directly shape the historical record. If repositories overrepresent certain regions, languages, or perspectives, future generations will inherit a distorted view of knowledge production. The webinar encouraged institutions to engage with diverse communities, expand representation, and be mindful of unconscious bias in collection practices. Preservation is not neutral. It reflects values and priorities, and those choices have long term consequences.

The webinar ultimately reinforced that digital preservation is foundational to the integrity of scholarship and cultural memory. It requires sustained organizational commitment, collaboration across institutions and borders, and continuous reflection on emerging technologies and ethical responsibilities. For librarians, publishers, repository managers, and scholars, the message was clear. The work of preservation cannot be postponed or treated as secondary. The reliability and richness of the future scholarly record depend on the decisions and investments made today.

You can watch the webinar below:

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Digital Preservation of the Scholarly Record Receives the 2026 Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact

Matt Smithers — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:13:11 +0000

February 10, 2026 The Rosenblum Award Committee announced that the 2026 Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact has been awarded to Digital Preservation of the Scholarly Record. This joint collaboration by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), celebrates innovations that have transformed scholarly publishing, and is now in its second year.

Digital preservation ensures that researchers, now and in the future, have reliable access to the full breadth of scholarly literature, providing a crucial safeguard against the loss of information due to technological obsolescence over time, infrastructure failure, publisher cessation, or other catastrophic events. As research builds upon the work that came before, the ongoing availability of the scholarly record is essential for progress and integrity in scholarship. Today, a robust and diverse ecosystem of digital preservation services and technical solutions underpins this mission, providing redundancy and resilience for the global research community.

The Rosenblum Award, established in memory of Bruce Rosenblum, recognizes technologies, infrastructure, standards, or practices that have become indispensable to scholarly publishing. Rather than honoring individuals or organizations, the Award highlights transformative innovations that have shaped the scholarly ecosystem and continue to inspire progress.

Why the Digital Preservation of the Scholarly Record was selected

Digital preservation is the invisible infrastructure that makes scholarly communication possible for generations to come. This year’s award recognizes the collaborative achievements of libraries, publishers, technologists, and preservationists who have worked tirelessly to ensure that the scholarly record remains accessible, reliable, and secure.

The need for digital preservation became a specific focus of the academic library community in the late 1990s, as the transition from print to digital publishing raised new challenges for long-term access. Libraries, publishers, and preservation services have since developed best practices and sustainable models to safeguard digital literature at scale. Today, organizations across the ecosystem play a vital role in preserving millions of scholarly articles, books, supplementary content and datasets.

Despite significant progress, challenges remain. New forms of scholarship, such as dynamic web-based content, research data, software, and gray literature, require ongoing attention to ensure their preservation. The Rosenblum Award Committee will be conducting interviews with leaders and innovators in digital preservation, and a video capturing their insights will be released later this year.

About The Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact

The Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact honors the memory of Bruce Rosenblum and recognizes infrastructure-level contributions that have become essential to the scholarly ecosystem, innovations that enable collaboration, interoperability, and trust across the global research community. The 2025 Rosenblum Award recognized the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for Scholarly Publishing. A video featuring community voices on digital preservation will be released later in 2026.

The Rosenblum Award Governance Committee
The Award Governance Committee is made up of the leadership of the five organizations, responsible for overall management:

ALPSP: Wayne Sime, CEO
AUPresses: Peter Berkery, Executive Director
NISO: Todd Carpenter, Executive Director
SSP: Melanie Dolecheck, Executive Director
STM: Caroline Sutton, CEO

The Rosenblum Award Committee
The Award Committee consists of representatives from each of the five organizations, designated for their deep expertise and tasked with operational planning, recipient selection, and promotion:

ALPSP: Lou Peck and Louise Russell
AUPresses: Charles Watkinson
NISO: Mary Beth Barilla and Todd Carpenter
SSP: Yael Fitzpatrick and Judy Hum-Delaney
STM: IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg and Craig Van Dyck

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Preserving the Past, Connecting the Present, Securing the Future: Qatar National Library and CLOCKSS

Matt Smithers — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:53:30 +0000

Digital preservation isn’t just about storing files; it is about safeguarding knowledge, culture, and history for generations to come. In our recent webinar, Dr. Arif Shaon, Head of Digital Curation, Preservation, and Access at Qatar National Library (QNL), and Dr. Alicia Wise, Executive Director of CLOCKSS, shared journeys, challenges, and visions for the future of global digital preservation.

Dr. Shaon highlighted QNL’s strategic efforts to safeguard Qatar’s cultural and intellectual heritage through large-scale digital repatriation and long-term preservation. Aligned with Qatar National Vision 2030, the library has been at the forefront of digitizing, repatriating, preserving, and providing sustained public access to historical materials dispersed across global archives. Since the launch of the Digital Repatriation Program in 2014, initially in partnership with the British Library and later expanded to institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Library has repatriated and made openly accessible an increasingly large and diverse range of digitized heritage material, including over two million digitized pages and over ten thousands aerial photographs, relating to Qatar and the wider Gulf region. This repatriated content is made available primarily through the Qatar Digital Library, a leading Open Access digital archive for Middle Eastern history that documents Qatar’s historical development and transformation.

QNL’s preservation journey has evolved rapidly, moving from locally managed infrastructure to a scalable, cloud-based environment. The library initially implemented an open-source digital preservation solution based on Archivematica, building in-house expertise and workflows, and later engaged Artefactual Systems, the official vendor of Archivematica, to further optimize, stabilize, and mature the service. With well-defined digital preservation policies, file format action plans, and risk assessment frameworks inspired by PRONOM and the Library of Congress, the library has built a resilient, future-ready digital preservation ecosystem.

“Close, transparent communication with partners ensures preservation is a mutually beneficial endeavor, restoring cultural history while contributing to the global knowledge base,” Dr. Shaon emphasized.

Dr. Wise shared how CLOCKSS safeguards scholarly content from nearly 80 countries. Eschewing cloud storage, CLOCKSS operates a dark archive, keeping content secure in vaults at 12 universities worldwide and making it accessible only if a publisher disappears. Governed jointly by libraries and publishers, CLOCKSS ensures trust, resilience, and the integrity of the scholarly record.

“Digital content is most robust when stored in multiple trusted archives. Facilitating connections between national libraries, data archives, and publisher archives is increasingly important,” Dr. Wise noted, highlighting the value of collaboration.

Both institutions acknowledged the ongoing challenges of standardizing metadata, ensuring discoverability, and navigating licensing and copyright complexities. Dr. Shaon described QNL’s innovative approaches, including AI-assisted metadata enrichment, while Dr. Wise shared how inspired she was by efforts by the British Library and others to reconnect dispersed collections such as the Dunhuang manuscripts from the silk road, making culturally significant materials accessible globally.

The webinar ended on an optimistic note. Both QNL and CLOCKSS emphasized the importance of regional networks, champions, and gatherings to promote digital preservation across the Middle East and North Africa. As Dr. Shaon put it, “The National Library cannot do it alone. Collaboration with regional and international partners is essential for a sustainable digital preservation ecosystem.” Dr. Wise added, “Partnership ensures that the voices and perspectives of underrepresented regions are preserved in the global scholarly record.”

This conversation showcased how Qatar National Library and CLOCKSS are leading the way in digital preservation, demonstrating that collaboration, innovation, and shared expertise are the keys to safeguarding our collective knowledge. The future of preservation looks bright, with partnerships bridging cultures, countries, and technologies.

Watch the full webinar on our YouTube channel

About Qatar National Library: Qatar National Library (QNL) serves as a host to Qatar’s national heritage by collecting, preserving and making available the country’s recorded history. In its role as a research library with a preeminent heritage library, the library fosters and promotes greater global insight into the history and culture of the Gulf region. As a public library, QNL provides equal access for all of Qatar's residents to an environment that supports creativity, independent decision-making, and cultural development. Through all these functions, QNL provides leadership to the country’s library and cultural heritage sector. Learn more about the library.

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Preserving Culture in Times of Crisis: How CLOCKSS and CCLP Strengthen Global Cultural Resilience

Matt Smithers — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 10:47:05 +0000

Libraries and cultural heritage institutions safeguard the memory and identity of communities, nations, and societies. Yet in times of war, natural disaster, political instability, and economic disruption, these institutions can become highly vulnerable. The recent CLOCKSS webinar explored this reality through the experience of Ukrainian libraries during the ongoing conflict. It also highlighted the importance of proactive infrastructure and collaboration through initiatives like CLOCKSS and the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP).

The session began with an update from Natalia Petrenko, director of Korolenko Kharkiv State Scientific Library, which has continued operating through some of the most challenging conditions imaginable. Since 2022, more than a thousand libraries in Ukraine have suffered damage or destruction, and millions of cultural materials have been displaced or lost. Despite these conditions, Ukrainian librarians have continued to digitize collections, safeguard rare materials, and maintain access to information for the public. The heroic efforts of our Ukrainian library colleagues demonstrate their extraordinary dedication and resilience, and they also reveal systemic fragilities in how cultural memory is preserved.

Preservation cannot depend solely on local capacity. Safeguarding cultural heritage requires support from networks, partners, and infrastructure that extends beyond national borders. This is where organizations such as CLOCKSS and initiatives such as CCLP play an important role.

The experience of Ukraine emphasizes why resilience is essential. Cultural heritage can be lost rapidly but rebuilding it can take decades. The CLOCKSS international distributed digital archive provides a form of continuity and security that does not rely on physical access to collections or local storage conditions. It ensures that the scholarly record remains intact and openly available for future generations, regardless of circumstances on the ground. This model of distributed preservation is not only important during acute crises. It ensures long-term sustainability by removing single points of failure, reducing the risk of permanent loss, and ensuring that responsibility is shared across a global community.

While CLOCKSS focuses on preserving digital scholarships, the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) via its platform (CYCLOPS) works to strengthen coordination in the stewardship of physical and digital cultural materials. The project aims to help libraries move from isolated, reactive responses to shared, strategic, and proactive planning for mutual support during crisis.

The challenges highlighted in Ukraine reveal that many libraries, when faced with crisis, need contributions, resources, space, and support, and ideally this would be delivered in a calm and well-organized way in response to actual needs, addressing also institutional limitations and abilities. Unfortunately, there is no such international coordination mechanism at present and so the volume of offers of assistance in myriad forms through myriad channels can itself be overwhelming. CCLP addresses this by developing shared infrastructure, including a metadata commons and collaborative decision-making tools (CYCLOPS), that enable institutions to jointly identify what materials are most at risk, what should be preserved, and how responsibilities should be distributed. This collaborative approach helps reduce duplication, prevent gaps in preservation, and supports focus and prioritization. Instead of individual libraries working alone, CCLP allows for coordinated action supported by data, shared tools, and collective commitment.

The crisis in Ukraine demonstrates that cultural memory is vulnerable not only in conflict zones, but anywhere infrastructure is fragile or funding is uncertain. Fires, floods, extreme weather, political unrest, and institutional restructuring are increasingly frequent. The preservation of cultural heritage, therefore, requires systems that are designed for continuity in unpredictable conditions.

Together, CLOCKSS and CCLP contribute to a foundation of cultural resilience. CLOCKSS safeguards the scholarly record by keeping content securely distributed and recoverable across a global network, ensuring continuity even in times of crisis. CCLP complements this by strengthening the capacity of libraries to plan and act collectively, coordinating preservation decisions rather than leaving institutions to work in isolation. By reducing dependence on any single storage location or organization, both initiatives help protect cultural memory against disruption. Ultimately, they support long-term access to knowledge as a shared global responsibility, sustained through cooperation rather than individual effort. In the coming months, the two initiatives plan on co-testing the infrastructure to allow such work to become integral to libraries worldwide.

The Ukrainian experience brings urgency and clarity to these efforts, but the implications extend globally. Cultural heritage preservation is not only a technical task; it is a commitment to the future. It requires preparation, infrastructure, coordination, and collective stewardship.

Watch the webinar recording

Watch Korolenko Kharkiv State Scientific Library preservation efforts

About CCLP: The Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) is an initiative aimed at helping libraries and cultural institutions manage the full lifecycle of their collections collaboratively. By sharing expertise, resources, and strategies, CCLP supports more efficient collection development, preservation, and access, enabling institutions to make informed decisions while reducing duplication and ensuring the long-term sustainability of shared cultural and scholarly resources. https://sites.google.com/view/cclifecycleproject/home

About CYCLOPS: CYCLOPS is a community-led, vendor-neutral, open source platform intended to help libraries make informed and coordinated collection-lifecycle decisions across institutions, before materials are bought, licensed, preserved, or deaccessioned. https://www.indexdata.com/cyclops/

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CLOCKSS and LOCKSS 2.0 – A Path to Scalable Digital Preservation

Matt Smithers — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 10:39:07 +0000

In the digital age, preserving the scholarly record is a strategic imperative. As such, CLOCKSS stands at the forefront of this mission, offering a resilient and community-governed archive that protects content even when publishers or platforms cease to exist. Behind its preservation goals lies a sophisticated system architecture built for scale, flexibility, and long-term access.

CLOCKSS operates on a two-tier network structure designed to separate preservation from content acquisition and access. A 12-node vault network handles preservation, while a 5-node harvest network manages ingestion. This architecture supports multiple ingestion pathways, including web harvesting, file transfer via FTP or SFTP, and even delivery on physical media. Given the wide range of publisher platforms and file formats involved, CLOCKSS relies on custom-developed plugins to manage ingestion and normalization workflows across diverse systems.

Much of the content preserved in CLOCKSS is not web native. This means it cannot be automatically harvested or normalized and often requires manual preprocessing and staging. Instead of handling all normalization and cleanup up front, CLOCKSS follows a deferred effort model. This approach defers intensive processing until content is triggered for release, typically when the original content becomes unavailable. While this strategy helps scale the preservation effort by spreading out the workload, it creates operational debt over time. Trigger events often require significant remediation, including resolving metadata gaps, format inconsistencies, and missing or malformed files. Preparing content for access in these scenarios can become a labour-intensive and time-sensitive process.

CLOCKSS relies on the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) software but has more complex business requirements than other preservation services using the same opensource software. Until recently, CLOCKSS was operating on the original LOCKSS 1.0 architecture. That is now changing with the transition to LOCKSS 2.0, a major upgrade designed to modernize the system and prepare it for the evolving demands of digital preservation.

LOCKSS 2.0 introduces a modular architecture based on microservices with clearly defined APIs. This separation of core functions, such as repository management, auditing, and content replay, makes the system more scalable, easier to maintain, and better suited for future integration with external systems. One of the most significant improvements is the support for direct deposit. This allows content to be ingested without relying on web crawling or manual staging, streamlining the entire ingestion process.

The platform also introduces a multi-crawler and replay framework that supports modern replay engines like Pywb and OpenWayback. These tools are better suited for rendering dynamic and JavaScript-driven web content, which is increasingly common in today’s digital publishing landscape. Another critical advancement is the move from a legacy flat-file system to database-backed operations, enabling better performance, scalability, and reliability, especially when managing large volumes of content.

The benefits of LOCKSS 2.0 are exciting. Ingest will be faster and more efficient, triggered content will be delivered with improved user experience, and automation is enhanced to ensure better interoperability with library and publisher systems.

The close collaboration between the LOCKSS team and CLOCKSS has enabled a seamless exchange of expertise, enhancing our ability to provide long-term digital preservation while managing the diverse and often complex needs of publishers, libraries, and institutions.

This modernization of LOCKSS opensource digital preservation software is a strategic shift. It provides the flexibility needed to keep up with evolving formats, platforms, and user expectations. By investing in this scalable architecture and adaptive workflows, CLOCKSS continues to fulfil its mission to preserve the scholarly record with integrity, and to support the community of services and users built around our shared LOCKSS software.

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Developing a Library Digital Preservation Strategy

Matt Smithers — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:45:48 +0000

Digital scholarship is at the heart of today’s research and learning. Without a clear plan, valuable knowledge can slip away through format changes, platform shifts, technology failures, or simple aging. A library digital preservation strategy sets out what you’ll keep, how you’ll keep it safe, and who is responsible - so the scholarly record you steward stays accessible, usable, and trustworthy for your researchers and community, now and into the future.

Getting started
A preservation strategy is a simple plan that says what you’ll keep, how you’ll keep it safe, and who does what - so people can still read and reuse your content years from now. This page walks you through the essentials in plain language and shows where CLOCKSS fits in.

Why have a strategy?
Before choosing tools or vendors, be clear on why you’re preserving. Purpose keeps the work focused and makes it easy to explain to colleagues funders, and other stakeholders.

Keep access going: If a platform change goes wrong or a publisher closes, your readers aren’t stranded.
Show you’re trustworthy: Authors and readers can see a clear plan, and evidence that you safeguard their interests.
Work smarter: Agreed rules stop one-off decisions and endless changes.
Reduce risk: You address obsolescence, vendor lock-in, and rights issues up front.

Build your strategy in 10 simple steps
Use these steps as your starter template. Each step has a brief explanation and a small set of actions - no jargon required. (This is where the NASIG model digital preservation policy fits - see below.)

1) Set your goals (why preserve?)
Goals are your north star - start with 2 or 3 short statements everyone can remember.

“Keep long-term access to published articles, books and related files (figures, data, code).”

“Ensure continuity of access despite shifts in national policies and priorities.”

2) Decide the scope (what’s in / what’s out)
Scope stops scope creep. Say clearly what you’ll preserve now, and what you won’t -plus why.

Include: Publications (PDF, HTML, XML, EPUB), digitised files,, datasets & code, images/audio/video, and key metadata (DOIs, ORCIDs, RORs).
Exclude (and say why): Preliminary analyses or “throwaway” datasets that were later replaced by higher-quality versions., routine communications such as email exchanges or meeting notes about project logistics., or anything you don’t have rights to keep yet.

3) Make a quick inventory (what you have, where it lives)
A lightweight list gives you visibility without creating bureaucracy.

List main content groups, where files are stored, who owns them, and file types.
Mark priority content (high value or at risk), e.g., disseminated by small publishers or unique datasets.

4) Assign roles (who does what)
Named people = real accountability.

For selection, rights checks, transfer, ingest, integrity checks, monitoring, reporting, and incident response, name:
- A lead person and a back-up (so you aren’t dependent on one person).

5) Set short, simple policies (the rules)
One page per topic is enough to start; you can expand later.

Selection & appraisal: how you choose and review priorities.
File formats: keep originals; create preservation copies like PDF/A where useful.
Metadata: DOI, creators + ORCID, licence, relationships.
Integrity (checksums): create on arrival; re-check on a schedule.
Access & rights: what you can share and when (e.g., during a platform outage).
Security & recovery: who can access files; how quickly you can restore.

6) Map your workflow (how the work flows)
A simple “happy path” prevents confusion and delays.

Identify & authorise content preservation
Transfer files (API/SFTP/export) with a file list
Validate (virus scan; basic checks; verify the checksum)
Ingest into your repository/preservation system
Replicate to another, independent trusted archive
Monitor jobs and scheduled integrity checks
Report monthly (what came in, what passed, any issues)

7) Choose storage & partners (avoid single points of failure)
Resilience comes from independence and diversity - more than one copy, place, and technology.

Keep important content in at least three different preservation services with different funding, governance, and technologies.
Pair your internal systems with an independent, community-governed dark archive for disaster-level risks and platform changes. (This is where CLOCKSS fits - see below.)

8) Plan time and money (sustainability)
Preservation is a practice, not a project. Budget for it.

Make a simple 3-year view of people, time, storage, memberships, and audits.
Set up a small steering group (library /IT/research office) that meets quarterly.

9) Set a few measures (prove it works)
A handful of metrics keeps you honest and shows progress.

Time from publication to “preserved copy.”
% of files with a recent checksum.
% of titles protected by an independent archive.

10) Improve steadily (don’t set-and-forget)
Small, regular improvements beat big, rare overhauls.

Review priorities each quarter.
Run one restore drill per year for each big content type (text, AV, data).
Fix gaps and update policies as you learn.

Common pitfalls (and easy fixes)
Most problems are predictable. Here’s how to dodge them without fuss.

“Backups = preservation.” Backups restore systems; preservation restores content even if the original system/vendor is gone. Use both.
“Cloud services = preservation.” Cloud storage is like renting space in someone else’s filing cabinet. You can put your files there, share them, and get them back easily but if you stop paying, the company changes, or a file gets deleted, it’s gone.
Enabling access to the preserved master copy. The preserved version is the master copy we keep safe for the long term. The access version is the user-friendly copy we share for viewing or download. They come from the same source, but serve different purposes: one protects, the other provides access.
Rights gaps. Make sure contracts explicitly allow/require preservation and open access if the source disappears.
Relying on one vendor or location. Always have an independent preservation copy (see CLOCKSS).

How to get started (a small, clear plan)
Have a look at the NASIG Model Digital Preservation Policy: https://nasig.org/NASIG-model-digital-preservation-policy It’s a friendly friend!

Start small, learn fast, and scale. Here’s a 12-week outline you can actually follow.

Weeks 1–2 - Foundations

Choose a pilot (e.g., one journal list or one digitised collection).
Write 1 page of Goals & Scope and 1 page of Roles & Workflow.
Make a simple inventory (what, where, who, formats).

Weeks 3–6 - Make it real

Publish short policies: Formats, Metadata, Integrity, Access & Rights.
Automate file transfer + checksum validation for the pilot.
Start a monthly preservation report.

Weeks 6–12 - Build resilience

Add a second, independent preservation copy — this is where CLOCKSS comes in.
Run a restore test and document the steps and timing.
Expand the scope based on what you learned.

Where CLOCKSS fits (and why include it)
Your strategy needs an independent safety net. CLOCKSS is purpose-built to be that safety net for scholarship.

Independent assurance: CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit, community-governed dark archive that protects the scholarly record beyond any single business, country, or platform.
Global, resilient network: Content is preserved across multiple locations with regular integrity checks.
Trigger access when needed: If the original source goes away, CLOCKSS provides open access so your readers aren’t left without content.
Easy to plug in: We work with your publishers and platforms to set up feeds, verify ingest, and give you the evidence your stakeholders expect.

Next step: Building or refreshing your preservation strategy?
Bring CLOCKSS in as your independent layer.
Let’s map your content and set up a right-sized onboarding.

Tiny glossary (for beginners)
A few quick definitions to de-jargon the process.

Checksum (fixity): A digital fingerprint; re-checking it tells you a file hasn’t changed or corrupted.
Dark archive: A preserved copy that stays closed unless specific conditions happen (e.g., the source disappears).
PDF/A: A long-term, preservation-friendly version of PDF.
DOI / ORCID: Persistent IDs for publications and researchers.

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Our Sustainability Journey: CLOCKSS and Carbon Footprint Tracking

Matt Smithers — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:34:58 +0000

In July 2023, CLOCKSS began a 15-month journey to better understand the environmental impact of our long-term digital preservation service. While our mission is to safeguard scholarly content for future generations, we recognize that sustainability must also guide how we operate. We're now sharing a high-level analysis of our carbon footprint, and some important lessons we’ve learned.

We started by forming a project team and partnering with experts from DIMPACT, who specialize in helping digital organizations assess and reduce their climate impact. Our first step was a two-hour workshop to map how content flows through the CLOCKSS system: how it’s ingested, preserved, and accessed. This workshop focused on digging deep into how CLOCKSS really works. How is content ingested, stored, and served? How do administrators and users interact with preserved content before and after it enters the archive? From this, we created a rough map of our content flow: into, around, and out of the CLOCKSS archive. The workshop also helped us visualize our infrastructure and create a working model of the archive.

A second workshop refined this model, identifying the actual machines involved in service delivery, where each is located, and what each one does and how often. This was a bit of a revelation as no one had a complete understanding of all the distributed kit we use to deliver the archive. There were unexpected benefits of this cross-organizational alignment – for example it helped us update our corporate asset register and strengthened shared understanding across the various research organizations that host CLOCKSS machines.

Next, we agreed on a set of data points to collect. Given CLOCKSS is hosted at 12 global sites, we focused on gathering data at four locations: University of Edinburgh, University of Alberta, Stanford University, and Indiana University.

Each site offered unique insights. For example:

Stanford, located in a region with a strong renewable energy mix, had good data availability and is well along its clean energy transition.
Indiana, located in a region heavily reliant on fossil fuels and where CLOCKSS machines are deeply integrated into a high-performance computing environment, proved more complex, but the process sparked important conversations about sustainability.

We plugged the data into a modelling spreadsheet and estimate that CLOCKSS generates about 9 tonnes of carbon per month from its archiving service and another 1 tonne per year from travel. Integrity checking, a key process ensuring content authenticity, is our most carbon-intensive operation. Notably, this estimate covers only the use phase of our hardware. We haven't yet quantified the embodied emissions, the environmental cost of producing our servers which will add to our overall footprint. We have got insight into the environmental cost of disposal, with host institutions having an array of thoughtful policies.

We presented our findings at iPRES 2024, the leading international digital preservation conference, where peer feedback will help us generalize the CLOCKSS model for broader application across the preservation community. This work is now underway under the auspices of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s new Carbon Footprint Taskforce.

This project wasn’t easy. It required sustained collaboration, deep inquiry, a lot of tenacious data gathering, and real organizational effort. But it was worth it. We now have clearer insights that will inform future decisions such as how many content copies we store, where we locate nodes, and other ways we can help to decrease our impact on the climate and environment.

As stewards of the scholarly record, we must preserve not just knowledge, but also the world that future scholars will inhabit.

The post Our Sustainability Journey: CLOCKSS and Carbon Footprint Tracking appeared first on CLOCKSS.

New Pilot: Diamond Open Access

Matt Smithers — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:00:47 +0000

CLOCKSS is proud to launch a pilot program to preserve Diamond Open Access publications - at no cost to participating libraries, whether current supporters or new to our community.

Diamond OA journals, published without author or reader fees, play a vital role in inclusive, community-driven scholarship. Yet, many lack the resources for long-term digital preservation. This initiative addresses that gap, ensuring these valuable contributions remain accessible, discoverable, and secure for future generations.

For our current library partners and those considering becoming CLOCKSS supporters, this pilot showcases the tangible value of your investment. By supporting CLOCKSS, you help preserve a critical segment of open scholarship while reinforcing an equitable and resilient publishing landscape. Your participation not only secures the future of Diamond journals—it affirms a shared commitment to protecting diverse, high-quality research as a public good.

For more information please see:

Supporting Libraries

If you have questions or want to know more? Contact us below:

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