You may already know the story of LOCKSS’ beginnings (PDF).
On a fall day in 1999, a hike in the woods became the backdrop for a spontaneous problem-solving session on the preservation gap affecting online journals. The hikers, an electronic serials librarian (Vicky Reich) and a computer scientist (David Rosenthal), sketched out a plan to replicate the incidentally distributed, redundant architecture by which print journals had been preserved, in a digital system. They brought the proposal to the Stanford University Librarian, Michael Keller, who famously blessed the project with the admonition, “don’t cost me any money; don’t get me into trouble; do what you want.”
