DARTH is excited to debut a new resource on Designing Sustainable Projects dedicated to helping digital humanists and scholars build projects that endure, evolve, and thrive. Digital projects face an array of sustainability obstacles as they age, such as shifting resources and technical obsolescence, and the most effective way to combat these challenges is to plan for the end at the beginning. By providing guidance frameworks for this initial planning, this new section empowers teams to invest in processes and technologies that ensure their projects achieve their desired legacy.

This new resource was created by Tricia Patterson (Senior Digital Preservation Specialist, Harvard Library), Arthur Barrett (Senior Technical Architect for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences), and Cole Crawford (former Senior Software Engineer, DARTH). Inspired by initiatives like The Endings Project and The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, the team launched the project Sustainable and Transformative Sunsetting for Research and Teaching with funding from Harvard University IT’s Emerging Technology and Innovation Program (ETIP). Their goal was to identify and test solutions for the hurdles they experienced at Harvard. Key challenges they identified include the ongoing expenses of cloud hosting, security risks over time, the vulnerability of custom code, and the time commitment required for maintenance. Their new guidance on for sustainable projects, and in particular the Digital Project Dossier they created, contains questions designed to address these challenges early in project design and development.

While the project was motivated by Harvard’s challenges, the team hopes its outcomes and guidance will serve users and projects well beyond Harvard—hence its new home on DARTH’s website. This addition is especially apropos given that DARTH recenty transformed this website from a dynamic to a static site. Previously hosted on Wordpress, this site was rebuilt using the server-first Javascript framework Astro, and it is now hosted on Github Pages. We are also using Astro to sunset projects into more easily maintained forms. For example, we converted Water Stories, the digital component to a 2023 exhibition curated by Dr. Jinah Kim (Department of Art and Art History), from a Django backend to an Astro site using django-bakery, a set of tools for turning Django sites into flat pages. The resulting website is almost exactly the same as the original, with the only difference being that users can no longer submit their own “water stories.” However, the stories submitted during the run of the exhibition remain available in both map and list form.

Planning to use django-bakery at the beginning of Water Stories in 2023 greatly reduced our 2025 workload, enabling us to easily recreate the website’s design and content in static form. We are currently working on sunsetting another of Dr. Kim’s projects, Dharma and Punya, a Wordpress website for a 2019 exhibition about Buddhist ritual art in Nepal. Unlike Water Stories, we did not build this project with the future in mind; as a result, the process of moving the site to Astro is more complicated. However, we look forward to preserving this fascinating digital collection of objects in static form.

Moving forward, we are excited to incorporate the new resources on Designing Sustainable Projects into our current and existing collaborations. Talking about the end at the beginning is difficult, and it is so valuable to have a guide!