Embedding Preservability in New Forms of Scholarship - Digital Preservation Coalition

"Over three years, with support from the Mellon Foundation, NYU Libraries led a project that embedded a team of preservation experts into the editorial and production workflows of nine publishers and three publishing platform developers. The publishers were creating what we described as complex or enhanced digital works, publications with features such as interactive visualizations, video, and non-linear navigation. The preservation partners joined early conversations about these works and offered feedback on how they could be made more preservable. The platform developers were managing or building systems to support such works and we met with them to assess how well their platforms supported preservation and to recommend improvements. In each case, we tracked which changes were adopted and how effective they were in improving preservability.

The work built on guidelines produced during an earlier project that analyzed already-published complex works to identify preservation challenges. These were used as a framework to provide feedback on the new publications and platforms. Preserving complex or interactive digital scholarship effectively can be difficult without significant attention at the project level. The initial guidelines aimed to clarify the limits of preservation tools and to show publishers, platforms, and content creators the kinds of process changes that can improve the odds of successful preservation even in the absence of preservation expertise on the project staff."