Have you seen the Modern Language Association’s new Evaluation Wiki? It’s “an ongoing project initiated by the MLA Committee on Information Technology (CIT) as a way for the academic community to develop, gather, and share materials about the evaluation of work in digital media for purposes of tenure and promotion.” One of the suggested questions for evaluating digital work is “Is there a deposit plan? Will it be accessible over the longer term? Will the library take it?” (Read more) If you are like many digital humanists, you have created innovative projects that exist in a fragile, distributed state, or are dependent on your university computing accounts for their continued existence. Maybe you have never given a thought to their long-term preservation, or the idea is so daunting that you quickly shelve it in favor of more manageable problems.

For the past year and a half, Louie Ulman (OSU Department of English) and I (OSU Libraries) have been working on an NEH grant-funded project to create a lifecycle model for electronic textual editions. Integral to this model is a preservation plan to ensure the long-term survival of such editions, and we have developed a number of tools and processes that can be applied to other types of complex digital projects as well.

Preservation starts with description, and we will show you how to use two of the tools – a content manifest (PDF) and a semantic map (PDF) (examples taken from an electronic text edition of a manuscript journal from the 1800’s) – to describe your project. The resulting descriptions will help you – most likely working in partnership with your library – to create an archival version of your project. We will also offer guidance for librarians working with digital humanists, and provide strategies for working with preservation repositories.

In the meantime, we would like to hear from you. What kinds of projects are you working on? What steps are you taking – or not taking – to ensure their longevity? What kinds of challenges do you face in doing so? (E.g. multiple software platforms, dependence on a benevolent systems administrator, etc.) Does your library play an active role in the support or preservation of digital humanities projects on your campus?