A three-tier digital preservation strategy

As university libraries, one of our key missions is to preserve scholarly digital content for future generations.
This implies safeguarding our own digital collections, of which we are the sole custodian, as these often include unique materials created by our scientific community. Examples include Ph.D. theses, offprints, and research data.
We must also ensure enduring access to subscribed scholarly content even if the subscription is canceled or if publishers discontinue publications.
To meet these challenges, we encourage libraries to adopt a global strategy based on three solutions leveraging the LOCKSS open-source technology.
Our poster depicts the implementation of this 3-pillar strategy at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) :

1. Community network
While a university library alone is unlikely to have the required human and technological resources to build an efficient distributed preservation solution, LOCKSS technology makes it easy for libraries to build their own community network to safeguard their collections of interest.
Following this approach, ULB - together with 6 university partners worldwide - has funded the SAFEPLN network in 2014.
Content is collected from our institutional repositories and replicated in seven preservation nodes, distributed across servers hosted in Europe and Canada.
Currently, a dozen similar networks have been created worldwide, with various objectives, scopes and organizational models.

2. Global LOCKSS Network
As a solution for post-cancellation access to our electronic resources, ULB joined the Global LOCKSS Network in 2012.
If we terminate a subscription to one of our resources or the resource becomes temporarily unavailable from the publisher, a copy remains available in our local server and we can restore access to our users.

3. CLOCKSS
Unfortunately, not all our key electronic resources are available on the Global LOCKSS network. Therefore, ULB also chose to support the CLOCKSS service from 2024.
CLOCKSS is a dark archive encompassing over 54 million journal articles, and 475.000 e-books from the world's leading publishers, ensuring open access if content disappears from the web.

The three-pillar approach outlined here empowers libraries to take charge of their digital preservation. Instead of relying on third-party solutions, we become active players in preservation, embracing our essential mission.