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.

 

Andrew K. Pace, ARL executive director, stated that “Victoria and David’s unwavering commitment to digital preservation and their innovative leadership with LOCKSS have made a lasting, positive impact. Their work continues to address the critical challenge of ensuring the long-term accessibility and integrity of digital content.”

 

Reich has held professional roles at the University of Michigan, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and Stanford University. As an executive committee member of the Stanford Digital Library Project, a multi-institutional research project that was the genesis of Google’s founding, she shared how researchers use libraries, including the importance of linked citation tools. She also played a pivotal role in the transition of journals from paper to electronic distribution, notably contributing to HighWire Press's success in providing widespread access to critical journal information. She now serves as Executive Director Emerita of the LOCKSS Program after leading it for almost two decades and contributing to the founding and development of the CLOCKSS Archive.

 

After helping pioneer campus networks at Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Project, Rosenthal's career in Silicon Valley started forty years ago at Sun Microsystems. He was a Distinguished Engineer working on window systems including the X Window System and various parts of Sun's Unix operating system. In 1993, he left Sun to become the fourth employee at Nvidia where he co-architected how programs communicated with Nvidia's first chip.


In 1998, Rosenthal began prototyping the LOCKSS software at Stanford with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 1999 to 2002, he continued developing LOCKSS at Sun Labs before returning to Stanford to work on the program under a major NSF grant, remaining there until his retirement in 2017. 


In addition to his numerous technical publications, he has been blogging since 2007 on topics such as digital preservation economics, storage media, and decentralized systems.

 

“LOCKSS has been instrumental in advancing sustainable digital preservation,” said John O’Brien, president and CEO of EDUCAUSE. “Victoria and David exemplify the values of our three organizations, and their achievements enhance an already remarkable roster of past award recipients.”

 

Selection committee members for the Paul Evans Peters Award included: Joshua Greenberg, director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, university librarian, University of Waterloo; Xuemao Wang, dean of libraries and Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian, Northwestern University; and Diane Goldenberg-Hart, assistant executive director, CNI.

 

The award will be presented during the CNI Spring 2025 Membership Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 7–8, where Reich and Rosenthal will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture. The talk will be recorded and released on CNI’s YouTube and Vimeo channels. 

 

Previous award recipients include Tony Hey (2024), Paul Courant (2022), Francine Berman (2020), Herbert Van de Sompel (2017), Donald A.B. Lindberg (2014), Christine L. Borgman (2011), Daniel E. Atkins (2008), Paul Ginsparg (2006), Brewster Kahle (2004), Vinton Gray Cerf (2002), and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).

 

CNI, ARL, and EDUCAUSE sponsor the Paul Evan Peters Award, established with additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox Corporations. The award honors the memory of Paul Evan Peters (1947–1996), a visionary and coalition builder in higher education and scholarly communication. He led CNI from its founding in 1990 with informed insight, exuberant direction, eloquence, and awareness of the needs of its varied constituencies of librarians, technologists, publishers, and others in the digital world.

 

For more information, visit the award website at https://www.cni.org/go/pep-award.

 

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is a joint program of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE that promotes the use of information technology to advance scholarship and education. Some 200 organizations representing higher education, publishing, information technology, scholarly and professional organizations, foundations, libraries, and library organizations, make up CNI’s members. Learn more at cni.org.

 

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of research libraries in Canada and the US whose vision is to create a trusted, equitable, and inclusive research and learning ecosystem and prepare library leaders to advance this work in strategic partnership with member libraries and other organizations worldwide. ARL’s mission is to empower and advocate for research libraries and archives to shape, influence, and implement institutional, national, and international policy. ARL develops the next generation of leaders and enables strategic cooperation among partner institutions to benefit scholarship and society. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.

 

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to lead the way, advancing the strategic use of technology and data to further the promise of higher education. We connect and empower our member community through insights, advocacy, resources, and learning opportunities to anticipate trends and strengthen professional practice. Learn more at educause.edu.