First French partner joins LOCKSS Alliance

The Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) has become the first French member of the LOCKSS Alliance.

The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Alliance was founded in 2004 and about a hundred libraries around the world are members. This community is centred around the use of the LOCKSS software, which was developed by Stanford University in the USA. This free software is a way for libraries to preserve the electronic journals to which they subscribe.

LOCKSS operates as a network of journal duplicates associated with a control protocol. To ensure its preservation, a journal only needs to be archived on six different sites in the world. This makes LOCKSS a cost-effective solution because members no longer need to save their entire digital collections.