Meet More Digitization Pioneers: The LOCKSS Team, Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal
History is so important but often overlooked when it comes to online info retrieval and digitization. That’s why a big kudos goes to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress with their new series honoring digitization pioneers. The first profile offered a profile of Myron Gutman from ICPSR. We blogged about it a few weeks ago.

Now, a new profile is online that offers a brief history and profile of Vicky Reich & David Rosenthal, the co-founders of LOCKSS.

From the profile:

It has been almost 10 years since Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal co-founded LOCKSS (which stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) with the purpose of enabling libraries to preserve their own digital collections. Since then LOCKSS has continually evolved to meet the needs of librarians and has been widely adopted as an economical, easy-to-use digital archiving solution. And it has evolved in a few directions that Vicky and David did not foresee.

In the late 1990s, Vicky Reich – who by then had years of library administrative experience – was assistant director of Stanford’s HighWire Press. She noticed that an increasing number of important publications were showing up solely in digital format, not in print, and she became concerned that librarians might lose custody of those copies, especially since many librarians tended to know very little about preserving digital assets. David Rosenthal, a distinguished Silicon Valley engineer with a long history at Sun Microsystems, became involved in LOCKSS from the technical side, focusing on preservation of the bits and bytes.

Source: NDIIPP