LISNews: Librarian News

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a very interesting Story on the permanence of articles published in electronic journals.Stanford\'s HighWire Press, which offers more than 170 scholarly journals online, announced last week that it would test the approach this spring, in a project called Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, or LOCKSS. During the test, six computers across the country will each house a copy of a portion of two journal archives from the HighWire server. Each computer in the LOCKSS network will continually look for -- and correct -- errors in its copy by comparing it with other copies in the LOCKSS system. If the tests are successful, the system may expand beyond six computers.

Each library in the test group will archive the journals to which it subscribes on its own computer. If HighWire\'s main server at Stanford crashed or was destroyed by some disaster, or if a journal changed ownership and its access policies changed, LOCKSS would ensure that copies of that journal\'s archives were available to readers through the interlibrary system.