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The purpose of this paper is to answer questions about LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) that have arisen in the context of the German National Hosting study.

The paper describes what the LOCKSS software can do and how the LOCKSS community is organized. The descriptions come from direct experience with LOCKSS and from comments by the developers.

LOCKSS offers a robust and cost‐effective mechanism to carry digital content undamaged into future centuries. It also offers a distributed network that is robust against natural, social, political or economic catastrophes at one or even several locations. Its financial and organizational philosophy avoids a single point of financial or administrative failure.

Regardless of which national hosting system is selected, the chosen system ought to have qualities similar to these.

This paper aims to discuss the public knowledge project (PKP) preservation network (PN), which provides free preservation services for eligible journals by collecting article content and preserving it in a network of (at the time of writing) eight “preservation nodes” using the LOCKSS system. The PKP PN was launched in June 2016.

This paper addresses the development and implementation of a free, distributed digital PN for open journal systems (OJS) content. It discusses challenges in developing the network, in particular relating to preserving content from a set of partners who have no formal business relationship with PKP. The paper examines data regarding journals that have opted in to the network to date and considers interface usability and other barriers facing those that have not joined.

Within 18 months of launch, more than 600 journals had opted to be preserved in the PKP PN. Many more journals are eligible to join the network; the paper explores potential strategies to increase participation and identifies and proposes methods to overcome technical and communication barriers.

This paper describes a highly collaborative, open-source preservation initiative which forms a unique part of the e-journal preservation landscape and preserves a particularly vulnerable portion of the scholarly record.

This paper aims to focus on how long‐term digital archiving systems are tested and what benchmarks and other metrics are necessary for that testing to produce data that the community can use to make decisions.

The article reviews recent literature about digital archiving systems involving public and semi‐public tests. It then looks specifically at the rules and metrics needed for doing public or semi‐public testing for three specific issues: triggering migration; ingest rates; and storage capacity measurement.

Important literature on testing exists but common metrics do not, and too few data are available at this point to establish them reliably. Metrics are needed to judge the quality and timeliness of an archive's migration services. Archives should offer benchmarks for the speed of ingest, but that will happen only once they come to agreement about starting and ending points. Storage capacity is another area where librarians are raising questions, but without proxy measures and agreement about data amounts, such testing cannot proceed.

Testing is necessary to develop useful metrics and benchmarks about performance. At present the archiving community has too little data on which to make decisions about long term digital archiving, and as long as that is the case, the decisions may well be flawed.

The article shows that testing is key to making rational decisions about digital long term archiving systems but establishing metrics and rules by which librarians can compare the results is far from easy.

The purpose of this paper is to present a brief overview of the current state of distributed digital preservation (DDP) networks in North America and to provide a detailed technical, administrative, and financial description of a working, self‐supporting DDP network: the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet).

The paper reviews current regional and national initiatives in the field of digital preservation using a variety of sources and considers ADPNet in the context of generally accepted requirements for a robust DDP network. The authors view ADPNet in a comparative perspective with other Private LOCKSS Networks (PLNs) and argue that the Alabama model represents a promising approach to DDP for other states and consortia.

The paper finds that cultural memory organizations in a number of countries have identified digital preservation as a critical issue and are crafting strategies to address it, with DDP‐based solutions gaining in popularity in North America. It also identifies an array of technical, administrative, and financial challenges that DDP networks must resolve in order to be viable in the long term.

The paper describes a working model for building a low‐cost but robust DDP network.

The paper is one of the first comprehensive descriptions of a working, self‐sustaining DDP network.

The LOCKSS digital preservation technology collects, preserves and disseminates content in peer-to-peer networks. Many such networks are in use. The Global LOCKSS Network (GLN) is an open network with many nodes in which libraries preserve academic journals and books that they purchase. The CLOCKSS network is a closed network, managed by a non-profit consortium of publishers and libraries to form a dark archive of e-journal content. There are also many Private LOCKSS Networks (PLNs) preserving various genres of content. Each of these networks is configured to meet the specific requirements of its community and the content it preserves. This paper seeks to address these issues.

This paper describes these architectural choices and discusses a development that could enable other configurations.

Third-party rights databases would allow hosted LOCKSS networks.

Hosted LOCKSS networks would be cheaper.

Reducing cost of digital preservation is important in a time of strained library budgets.

This paper aims to examine the emerging field of digital preservation and its economics. It seeks to consider in detail the cooperative model and the path it provides toward sustainability as well as how it fosters participation by cultural memory organizations and their administrators, who are concerned about what digital preservation will ultimately cost and who will pay.

The authors cast light on the decisions that administrators of cultural memory organizations are making on a daily basis – namely, to preserve or not to preserve their digital collections. They assert that either way, a decision is being made, costs are incurred, and consequences are being levied. The authors begin by exploring the costs incurred by cultural memory organizations if they do not quickly establish digital preservation programs for their digital assets. They move then to look to the digital preservation field's preliminary findings regarding the costs of preserving digital assets and who should ideally subsidize this investment.

The authors describe one economically sustainable digital preservation model in practice, the MetaArchive Cooperative, a distributed digital preservation network that has been in operation since 2004. The MetaArchive has built its economic sustainability model and has experienced successes with it for over five years.

There are very few studies or articles in the literature that review studies on the economics of digital preservation and apply them to digital preservation initiatives in action. This article provides that application and further articulates why cultural memory organizations should invest themselves and learn how to provide for the preservation of their own digital collections.