Introduction

Designing Sustainable Projects

Launching a custom digital project is an opportunity to leverage innovative technologies for novel insights while expanding access to scholarship. After launch, the persistence of the project is dependent on maintaining code, tools, digital objects, security updates, documentation, and project and staff oversight. The proliferation of custom projects that each have distinct components and vulnerabilities results in mounting constraints on finite resources, and projects face nebulous, incremental decline. Not every project needs to persist forever as it was created, but every team can achieve a deliberate outcome for their project by embedding a sustainability plan into the design phase.

This resource serves to empower project teams to make intentional decisions at project inception that will ensure they successfully target their desired research legacy. It consists of:

The audience is anyone involved in the design of the digital project, which may include: Principal Investigators (PIs), project managers, digital humanists, developers, and other related staff, faculty, and/or students. This resource is best utilized during the project design phase, so that design decisions are informed by the team’s long-term objectives. It can be consulted and updated through the duration of the project lifecycle, to ensure the technical decisions and project documentation continue to support your sustainability goals.

This guidance is compiled by Harvard University Information Technology, FAS Research Computing, and Harvard Library to maximize the successful stewardship of Harvard’s remarkable scholarship. It is a lightweight guide and draws extensively from existing good practice in the field of digital humanities and the preservation of custom digital applications, while outlining Harvard-specific options and considerations.

Why think about “the end,” at the beginning?

Digital projects face an array of sustainability obstacles as they age, such as dwindling resources and technical obsolescence, and the most effective way to combat these challenges is to plan for the end at the beginning. Read on to learn more about these risks and challenges, and how critically evaluating them early on can minimize their impact.

“…digital project teams need to answer the question, ‘How long do we want this to last?’ at the very same moment as they are formulating their intellectual goals.” —The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap

Socio-technical vulnerabilities

At its core, a digital project is a composite of multiple technical and content components, such as databases, archival collections, crowd-sourced data, links, visualizations, source and executable code, web servers – and more. Each of these components requires maintenance activities to keep the project stable over time. For example:

  • Regularly updating technical dependencies and staying up-to-date with version releases to incorporate bug fixes
  • Security patching to mitigate vulnerabilities at the application, database, and operating system levels
  • Taking periodic snapshots of data volumes and/or databases for recovery
  • Monitoring application performance throughout the project lifecycle, to adjust compute capacities for cost optimization

If the project incorporates licensed content or content hosted by third parties, such as audio streaming on commercial platforms, there is little to no control over the stability of those components. On top of that, staff turnover, inconsistent documentation, ambiguous project custody, and finite funding also pose a risk to the stability of the project over time. For example, if some project components are falling into disrepair and a developer on the DARTH team wants to stabilize it, there may not be any remaining people.

“Persistence is a function of organizations, not of technology.” —DOI Foundation

While a project is being used to support an ongoing course (student users), research project (faculty users), or staff (an online exhibit, for example), resources may be more readily available to support high traffic/bandwidth access patterns, a non-negligible consideration given the increasingly common use of “heavy” media assets, including A/V or 3D data objects. Such usage levels may continue for the length of a single term, or an entire career, but - critically - available technical and administrative (e.g., staff) resources may not. Once a project enters its inactive state, whether intentionally or by design, associated multimedia derivatives often lose support first, as third-party media hosting platform licenses lapse or hosting fees are subjected to routine (or targeted) cost-cutting initiatives while static website components may linger on…

Scale

While incremental, dedicated maintenance may be available for a handful of high-profile projects, the volume of digital project work continues to increase, along with the cost of hosting and serving associated media components. It is therefore hard to support at scale the demand for these sorts of scholarly outputs, which unfortunately means the potential for slow degradation, a long tail of uncertain maintenance, and eventual loss of access to digital projects. Digital humanities projects, for instance, have an average lifespan of between five to sixteen years, based on institutional circumstances (Meneses, L. and Furuta, R., 2019; VandeCreek, 2022). The Digital Preservation Coalition, an international organization focused on the “sustainable future for our digital assets,” considers custom online databases (in the form of research outputs and websites) to be “Critically Endangered” when there are aggravating circumstances like: “Lack of export options; lack of system maintenance; expired domain; lack of export functionality; lack of technical knowledge and skills; limited or dysfunctional data management planning; web capture challenges that means unlikely to be picked up by automatic crawlers; uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works” (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2024).

Sustainable strategy

The most effective way to combat these challenges and ensure that custom digital projects are sustained for their intended duration in a meaningful way (e.g., without compromise to their most important core qualities) is to plan for the end at the beginning of the project. Scholarship on sustainability in digital projects echoes this sentiment:

“…much as with traditional production and publication of research materials of archival quality, digital projects benefit from being planned and executed with their longevity in mind from the start.”
—“Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital scholarship and archiving in King’s Digital Lab” (2019)

Each project team will interpret what the end looks like for their product – whether that’s intentional sunsetting, maintaining a static version of the project for a set duration of time, planning on long-term funding for the project, or preserving a version of it for history. By using the Project Sustainability Dossier to discuss intended outcomes with your team and to document components that future maintainers will need, you can ensure the efforts, energy, resources, and labor that you put into your project is well invested. Discussing these challenges and documenting your project intentions during the active phase(s), future stewards of your project will not have to expend additional resources attempting to guess what the most significant properties of your project are and how they are best sustained.