Washington, DC –Victoria Reich and David Rosenthal, co-founders of the LOCKSS Program , have been named the 2025 recipients of the Paul Evan Peters Award by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE. The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.
“LOCKSS is a stunning achievement—both technically and on a social and organizational basis—that fundamentally changed thinking about digital preservation, particularly with regard to the scholarly record. It’s stunning both in its design, which is extraordinarily sophisticated, and its execution, which has included a quarter century of advocacy and outreach. The visionary security and resilience thinking built into LOCKSS is a model I can only wish more systems have internalized,” said CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch. “‘Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe’ has become perhaps the fundamental principle of preservation in the digital environment.”
In 1998, Reich and Rosenthal co-founded the LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) Program at Stanford University Libraries with funding from the National Science Foundation and later the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. LOCKSS aimed to ensure the long-term, low-cost preservation of digital materials and empower organizations, particularly libraries, to steward and preserve their own digital collections.
The LOCKSS software has since been adopted as an economical, easy-to-use, and robust basis for the massive, global, publisher-supported CLOCKSS network and networks preserving, among others, e-journals and government documents. Through research, development, and maintenance, the proven technologies mitigate technological, economic, and legal threats to data persistence.
