Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Susta<strong>in</strong>able Preservation and Curation Infrastructures for Digital Humanities
Creat<strong>in</strong>g a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for the humanities <strong>in</strong>volves not just creat<strong>in</strong>g new collaborative scholarly
spaces for access<strong>in</strong>g distributed content and services but also ensur<strong>in</strong>g the long-term preservation,
curation, and susta<strong>in</strong>ability of that content. Although digital preservation has received a great deal of
attention <strong>in</strong> the library community, 690 the specific challenges of preserv<strong>in</strong>g complicated digital
humanities projects have received less attention. In her recent overview of this subject, L<strong>in</strong>da Cantara
noted how most scholarship <strong>in</strong> this area seemed to assume that preservation was the responsibility of
the creator of a digital project. At the same time, she observed most humanities scholars seemed to
believe that <strong>in</strong>stitutional or digital repositories be<strong>in</strong>g created by research libraries would handle all the
challenges of the creation of the metadata necessary for both preserv<strong>in</strong>g and ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the usability
of digital content (Cantara 2006). The <strong>in</strong>terim report of the “Blue Ribbon Task Force on Susta<strong>in</strong>able
Digital Preservation and Access” also found that there was no agreement among stakeholders as to
who should be preserv<strong>in</strong>g digital content or who should pay for it (NSF 2008).
This disconnect between content creators and preservers has begun to be addressed only <strong>in</strong> the past few
years. In 2009, a workshop entitled “Curriculum Development <strong>in</strong> Digital Humanities and Archival
Studies” was held at the Archival Education and Research Institute and enabled digital humanists and
archival researchers to meet and “collectively outl<strong>in</strong>e future directions for digital humanities research”
(Buchanan 2010). Among the issues discussed were the challenges of apprais<strong>in</strong>g collections of digital
objects and design<strong>in</strong>g navigable digital libraries that were accessible to nonexperts, the importance of
support<strong>in</strong>g collaboration, the cont<strong>in</strong>u<strong>in</strong>g need for descriptive metadata to discover items on a granular
level, the roles digital humanists have to play <strong>in</strong> construct<strong>in</strong>g digital archives, and def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the skills
needed by archivists and digital humanists. “It is crucial that the digital humanities not only ref<strong>in</strong>e its
extant discipl<strong>in</strong>ary foci, but also beg<strong>in</strong> to th<strong>in</strong>k generally and reflexively about its own susta<strong>in</strong>ability,
and that of its source data,” Buchanan concluded, add<strong>in</strong>g that “as the digital humanities community
cont<strong>in</strong>ues grow<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the direction of data collection and curation for born-digital (and not only paperto-digital,
or “digitized”) materials, the field must beg<strong>in</strong> to plan for regular surveys and monitor<strong>in</strong>g of
these valuable collections” (Buchanan 2010).
One of the largest-scale digital preservation research projects that ended <strong>in</strong> early 2010 was the
European Union–funded Planets (Preservation and Long-Term Access Through Networked
Services). 691 Accord<strong>in</strong>g to its website, the Planets Project, which began <strong>in</strong> 2006, was created to
“deliver a susta<strong>in</strong>able framework to enable long-term preservation of digital content, <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>g
Europe's ability to ensure access <strong>in</strong> perpetuity to its digital <strong>in</strong>formation.” This work <strong>in</strong>cluded a number
of activities such as provid<strong>in</strong>g preservation plann<strong>in</strong>g services, develop<strong>in</strong>g methodologies and tools for
the characterization of digital objects, 692 creat<strong>in</strong>g “preservation actions” tools to “transform and
emulate obsolete digital assets,” build<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>teroperability framework to <strong>in</strong>tegrate diverse tools and
services across a distributed network, provid<strong>in</strong>g a testbed to evaluate different preservation protocols,
tests and services, and oversee<strong>in</strong>g a dissem<strong>in</strong>ation program to promote vendor takeup and user tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g.
690 See Ball (2010) for an overview of the tools that have been developed to assist <strong>in</strong>stitutional repositories <strong>in</strong> digital preservation;. For an overview of
digital preservation issues for libraries, see McGovern (2007).
691 http://www.planets-project.eu/
692 This research has <strong>in</strong>volved determ<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g not only the significant properties of digital objects that must be ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed to ensure long-term mean<strong>in</strong>gful
access but also how these objects are used by different stakeholders and <strong>in</strong> what types of environments <strong>in</strong> order to determ<strong>in</strong>e appropriate preservation
strategies (Knight and Pennock 2008).