On a related note, if you all haven’t seen this Ariadne article by Chris Rusbridge (“Excuse Me… Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?”), it’s worth a read: www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/. It’s a few years old, but the points he raises about common assumptions re digital preservation are still spot-on, and are extremely relevant to our discussion. Small projects (and even big ones!) tend to be frightened away from digital preservation because the goal – to preserve everything perfectly, forever – seems so out of reach. We believe there are steps that can be taken to sustain projects that will have a big impact, even without reaching some ‘perfect’ state of preservation.

One complication I’d like to throw into the mix is this. As web use becomes more and more social as the years go by, the value of a given digital artifact becomes more and more difficult to locate in a single space. If I post a DH project on my blog, for instance, certainly I’ll want to preserve what I post there. But much of the value of what I post comes from the comments that are posted on the blog (which are easy enough to archive), as well as the commentary that comes from other blog posts in my network, discussions on Twitter, and so forth. Is there a meaningful way to take a snapshot of the network that gives my blog post meaning? (Moreover, since the longitudinal development of the network around a project is of great importance, is there a way to archive the development of the network as a series of snapshots or as an entire timeline?)

Really looking forward to discussing the issue with you.

I think this will be a great opportunity to explore these issues and I’m very excited to hear more about the process you’ve developed at OSU. We are about to revisit some of our recent larger projects in order to document the process of production and I think it would be great if we could also incorporate some solid archival description, etc.