The Keepers Registry currently has 8 participating archiving agencies:
- British Library
- CLOCKSS Archive
- Global LOCKSS Network
- HathiTrust
- Portico
- Archaeology Data Service
- National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- e-Depot
A quick look at their descriptions suggests that some may be interested in archiving MathOverflow.
The Center for Research Libraries appears to be the main international entity for assessing and certifying the trustworthiness and reliability of major archiving agencies. Some reports can be found here.
I looked in more detail at Portico since it has a very nice description of its services. I think they would classify MathOverflow as an e-journal. Their aim is to provide digital preservation, not a backup system nor a redundant access point. So this service would be suitable for a separate read-only "e-journal" archive of MathOverflow content, not for a site mirror (even if read-only) nor for permanent storage of MathOverflow data dumps. Their publication agreement can be seen here and the terms look very reasonable to me. Their pricing model is also very reasonable: so long as MathOverflow does not make \$250k in revenues, our annual contribution would be \$250.
It appears that HathiTrust and e-Depot currently only accept "monolithic" documents such as books and cannot accept periodicals or similar objects. Archaeology Data Service only accepts documents relating to archaeology and history.
The Global LOCKSS Network has an interesting framework.
This section describes how a LOCKSS Box works. Specifically, a LOCKSS Box performs five main functions:
- It ingests content from target websites using a web crawler similar to those used by search engines.
- It preserves content by continually comparing the content it has collected with the same content collected by other LOCKSS Boxes, and repairing any differences.
- It delivers authoritative content to readers by acting as a web proxy, cache or via Metadata resolvers when the publisher’s website is not available.
- It provides management through a web interface that allows librarians to select new content for preservation, monitor the content being preserved and control access to the preserved content.
- It dynamically migrates content to new formats as needed for display.
The system seems rather flexible but I couldn't determine what content formats they could support in their archival units. To use that option, we would need to maintain our own archive (distributing content in a format that LOCKSS can support) and the participating libraries would each have a permanent and authoritative cache of our archive in their LOCKSS Box.