Report on Preservation of ETDs: The LOCKSS Prototype The work of Kamini Santhanagopalan Virginia Tech Graduate Student in Computer Science Reported at the 9 th International Symposium on ETDs, Quebec City Presented By: Gail McMillan, Director Digital Library and Archives Virginia Tech

Agenda  Goals  What is LOCKSS?  Participating Universities  International ETD Preservation  Analysis and Results  Conclusion

Digital Preservation  Goal: Information should be  Readable  Usable in the future  Preservation – NOT just backup  Existing preservation techniques Floppy, CD and hard disk drives Central and distributed database servers

Technical Infrastructure Goals Build on successful LOCKSS open- source model Create dark archive for locally produced digital content Use off-the-shelf hardware Use open-source software Easy replication Demonstrate LOCKSS scalability

LOCKSS  Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe Peer-to-peer digital preservation system Open source software Turns an inexpensive desktop computer into a digital preservation appliance Easy, inexpensive way to  Collect  Store  Preserve  Provide access to the contents--or, not.

Functions of LOCKSS (1)  Collect Via a web crawler  Appropriate crawl rules are specified  Preserve and Audit Every institution preserves  Its own contents  Contents of partner universities  Contents are polled to determine authenticity and reinstate bad files

Functions of LOCKSS (2)  Provide access By running web proxies Open or restricted access  Dark Archives for partners’ ETDs Levels of access controlled at originating institutions  Administration Via a web user interface  Controlling access to cached contents and other functions

LOCKSS Preservation  Contents of each university (nodes M1 through M5) preserved at every other university Multiple, dispersed copies  Not a backup-- nothing is overwritten  All versions retained M1 M3 M2 M5 M4

ASERL-LOCKSS-ETD Initiative Florida State University Georgia Institute of Technology University of Kentucky University of Tennessee Vanderbilt University Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Preservation using LOCKSS  Prerequisites Minimum hardware configuration LOCKSS software installed on all participating partners’ systems Permissions for the LOCKSS system to collect, preserve, periodically validate, repair ETDs

Example Hardware Configuration  Enterprise (3TB) Dell PowerEdge Server 1850 LOCKSS - $3500 Dell PowerEdge Server 1850 Firewall - $2500 Dell/EMC AX100 SAN (3TB) - $10,000 RedHat Enterprise AS – = $100 UPS - $700 Server Rack - $1200  Grand Total - $16, w/ Rack - $18,  Desktop (200Gb) Intel Based Desktop LOCKSS (200Gb) - $500 Intel Based Desktop Firewall - $350 CentOS Linux - $0 UPS - $50  Grand Total - $900.00

Participating Universities  International universities Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Humboldt-Universität, Germany University of Cape Town, South Africa  US universities Florida State University Georgia Tech Virginia Tech

International ETDs Preservation (1)  For international universities KS wrote plug-ins to collect contents (ETDs) from the 3 universities  For US universities Verified and reused OAI plug-ins for the 3 universities

International ETD Preservation (2)  Example ETD collection University of Cape Town ETD collection Manifest (i.e., permissions) page: html html Screen shots of UCT plug-in and the crawl results of contents follow

University of Cape Town Plug-in (1)

UCT plug- in: Crawl Results with Level (depth) =4 Fetch delay = 6 seconds

Harvested International ETD Collections

Harvested American ETD Collection [source: ]

Tutorial on how to write plug-ins  KS developed mini-tutorial  10 screens  This tutorial can be Generalized for ETD plug-ins Extended to write OAI plug-ins

Conclusion and Future Work  International ETDs can be harvested and preserved using LOCKSS and OAI-PMH  It requires cooperation and collaboration from participating universities  Future Work An online portal open for the public to view certain details Brazil expressed interest in formalizing ETD preservation for the NDLTD using LOCKSS

Acknowledgements  Special thanks to LOCKSS (Stanford University) Thomas Robertson Seth Morabito  Thanks to all participating universities Florida State Georgia Tech Humboldt-Universität, Germany Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil University of Cape Town, South Africa Virginia Tech

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