Digital Project Sustainability Dossier

Overview

Sustainability is a broad term that can refer to content longevity, fiscal responsibility, minimizing environmental impact, ongoing social support, and other aspects. Baking in sustainability plans at project inception will help your team match your intellectual and technological goals, realistically assess maintenance opportunities, and target your intended longevity for the content of your project. Beyond that, it can elucidate your understanding of project outcomes and entry points and help the team use funds and staff time more deliberately.

During the project design phase, the project team should discuss the following project components, responsibilities, intentions, and potential long-term solutions. As decisions are made, they should be recorded in a Digital Project Dossier that can be referenced by present and future maintainers. Because expectations can shift due to changes in staffing, technologies, funding, and other variables, this dossier should be revisited and revised as the project evolves, and refinements should be discussed and documented by the project team.

Below, you can find an outline of the elements your team should discuss and document in your Project Dossier, as well as an example dossier for a project. For a more in-depth exploration of sustainability and documentation, please refer to the excellent resources that this brief, Harvard-specific guide is based on:

Digital Project Dossier

Discuss and document the below bullets with your team. You can download a template here.

Project Survey

Project rationale, scope, and outcomes

  • What are the intellectual goals of your project?
  • How will the intellectual goals manifest as project outputs?
    • Will there be a website that combines datasets to enable people to explore an issue in greater depth? Or an interactive component where the project audience can solve problems through a script that runs an analysis? Or a gallery of media from different sources?
  • What are the user-facing access points of the project outputs? Is it just the website, or are there multiple facets that the project audience can access and explore?
  • What are the anticipated (or actual) scholarly outcomes of the project? In other words, how will the outputs of the project serve your intellectual goals?
  • What project outputs are most important to maintain in order to serve its goals?
    • Examples:
      • For a project that combines static media elements, the data components (e.g. media like images or audio) themselves may be the most important experiential elements, while the website layout itself is not as important to achieve the intellectual goals
      • For a project that uses scripts to analyze user-input information, the dynamic ability of a user to interact with data and receive the analysis output may be the most important experiential element of the project

Audience

  • Who is the project designed for?
  • How will you know the project is usable for your intended audience? Identifying and documenting this will help sustain the usability of the project for the intended longevity.
  • How long do you anticipate your audience will interact with your project?
  • Will you leverage user analytics to measure engagement with your project over time? Will that inform the anticipated longevity of your project?

Project contributors and responsibilities

  • Who are the current staff involved in creating the project? (e.g., PIs, Team leads, Developers, Archivists, UX designers, Usability testers)
  • For what aspect of the project is each contributor responsible, and for how long?
  • Who are the staff that will be involved after project inception, when it transitions into a maintenance phase?
  • Are there clear handoffs in place for any staff that may leave or transition to other roles?

Funding

  • What aspects of the project incur costs? Could these change over time?
    • Examples: Staff time, storage and compute costs, third-party platform subscriptions, etc.
  • Is there any explicit funding for the project, like grants or funded fellowships? How are they contributing to the project, and what will happen to that aspect of the project when funding ceases?

Trajectory

  • For your project, how will you define the following stages of the project lifecycle?
    • Active creation: the phase in which a project’s vision and parameters are being developed or updated – so it is not limited to project inception and could emerge again during a later transformation. This phase includes planning activities and active implementation.
    • Maintenance: comes after active creation, when the intellectual and technological components of a project are no longer being actively developed and are subject to ongoing, non-transformative maintenance. Activities may include security updates, storage refreshes, software and hardware updates, maintaining hardware and operating systems, transitioning domains, etc. This phase is critical to the mid-term sustainability of the project, requires dedicated resources, and could last various durations of time.
    • Retirement: is the phase when a project transitions from ongoing maintenance to either graceful degradation, proactive removal, or long-term preservation by memory stewards. Your team can explore the “Solutions Menu” to discuss what retirement may look like for your project and discuss how they impact your technical decisions.
  • What are the expectations for the digital lifespan of the project?
    • Depending on the project’s intellectual goals, required resources, significant properties, and intended audience, your expectations may vary widely – and they may shift over time.
    • Proactively targeting a duration will enable your team to plan for subsequent discussions, needed funding, and technical decisions that ensure you can meet your targeted duration.
    • Discuss the options outlined in the Sunsetting and Sustainability Solutions and explore the right fit for your project.

Technical Components

Digital objects

Documentation of any technical components that a future steward would need knowledge of to successfully maintain, sunset, or preserve the project.

  • What are the various components of the project? Examples could include:
    • URLs, DOIs
    • XML
    • Databases
    • Wordpress site
    • Visualizations
    • Scripts
    • APIs
    • Citations
    • Media (e.g. audiovisual, image-based, 3D data, digital maps, etc.)
  • Are the components included in this project subject to compliance with Harvard’s Research Data Management and Policies?
  • Are any of the components being utilized already deposited in a Harvard-affiliated repository, such as the open-access repository DASH, Dataverse, or Harvard Library’s Digital Repository Service?
  • Which components are static? E.g. data that is viewed, like images and databases, and don’t change when users engage with them.
    • Example: Hearing Modernity is a project that collects multiple static components, such as video and audio files, images, and papers.
  • Which components are dynamic or interactive? E.g. responsive elements, where user inputs result in different outputs.
    • Example: Visualizing Russian is a project where users input data, which is parsed and analyzed to deliver different outputs.

Technical infrastructure

  • Data infrastructure
    • Where are the data components stored, and upon what are they dependent?
    • Examples:
      • If you have embedded data visualizations, where are the databases they are pulling from stored, and what software is needed to display the visualization?
      • If you have streaming audio embedded, where are the audio files stored (it could be more than one location), where are the APIs documented, and what platform are you streaming from?
    • How does the data flow through your project infrastructure?
  • Software infrastructure
    • What are the various software components, like web platforms or text analysis tools?
    • Document the the software used and how it has been implemented
  • Hardware infrastructure
    • Where are all of the project components physically stored and distributed?
      • Examples might include Google Drive, Sharepoint, Amazon Web Services, GitHub, or hosting services (for domains)
    • Are these free or paid storage solutions?
    • Where will your Project Dossier and other documentation be stored to hand over to future stewards?
  • For all of the above, consider and document:
    • What are the functions these components perform to meet your project’s goals?
    • How long will these technology components be required by your project?
    • Where the project team has intellectual control over different components, and where there are potential risks to sustainability of individual components.
      • For example, if your project leverages data from a national science database, what would happen if that database was closed down? Or if your project uses APIs to stream audio from a third-party platform, what would happen if that platform was shut down or began charging a fee?
    • How might changes in key technologies, external dependencies/services, or team composition impact the project’s ongoing maintenance and performance?