Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to the CUA (Catholic University of America) chapter of ASIST (American Society of Information Science and Technology) about the LOCKSS project. It was a different sort of audience for me (primarily CUA Library School students) and one I found I really enjoyed. Bright, earnest and really interested in learning something—which isn’t to say that I typically speak to disinterested dullards—but it was group that could move right to the theoretical, unburdened with the sort of day-to-day operational realities that bedevil those of us responsible for this sort of thing in the workplace.
Whether I managed to convey an understanding of LOCKSS is hard to judge. I did sense from the arc of the post-presentation Q&A that I made some progress in getting across the idea that LOCKSS is something today’s libraries do for tomorrow’s users, not something we derive much tangible benefit from today. I also tried to excite their inner-geek by spending some time on the subtleties and challenges of the LOCKSS protocol but quickly realized I wasn’t doing the topic justice and to really delve in would have meant a much different presentation. If you’re interested, here’s the paper (from 1996) that launched the idea that took shape as LOCKSS about 5 years later (thanks Microsoft):
http://research.microsoft.com/~lampson/58-consensus/WebPage.html
Anyway, I promised the group an online link to the presentation slides. Despite the fact that Keynote mangles some graphics during SWF export, I sent a link to the presentation as a Shockwave file (slow network warning—it is about a 30Mb download):
http://lso.gmu.edu/asist_lockss.swf
A faster-to-load version (static jpg’s) is also available.