Preservation differs from maintenance in that a project is not maintained in its current access point and is instead transferred into the custody of archives and treated as a culturally significant scholarly resource. Pursuing these pathways will require the partnership of Harvard Library and identification of an appropriate curatorial unit, and working with cultural memory stewards to determine what is most important to preserve and how it will be findable and usable for future generations. In lieu of these, the project team can develop their own personal archiving plan, which can be explored through the links to the resources below.
These options can be coupled with a “Sunsetting” and “Static Maintenance” options. For example, you may collaborate across departments to designate a sunsetting strategy, create a WACZ capture through Webrecorder for medium-term maintenance, sunset the project and transfer the WACZ as part of the “Digital Documentation Process” and then preserve the project and redirect the access points to an archival record.
Digital Documentation Process
Description: This pathway enables a project to sunset while capturing a snapshot of the project and preserving its findability and citability. The designers of the Digital Documentation Process (DDP) liken it to an exhibition catalog, where the exhibition comes down but the catalog captures its intellectual contributions in a more durable format. It is often utilized in tandem with a web archiving technology, such as Webrecorder or the Internet Archive, to create a snapshot of the project.
Characteristics of project candidates
- Projects that have enduring cultural and/or historical value and need to be referenced, but do not need to stay active and maintain extended usability
- Projects that sunset and are satisfied with a catalogue record, description, and web archiving snapshot as their legacy
Socio-technical considerations
- Requires early collaboration with either Harvard Library or another archival repository (or a personal archiving plan – which the DDP outlines), to determine the capacity and capability to adopt long-term stewardship responsibility for the project
- Compliance with standards, principles, and documentation outlined in the DDP
- Technical implementation can be as innovative and complex as the project team desires to achieve its intellectual goals, as long as they are comfortable losing that functionality when the project is sunset and a snapshot is captured – though complying with the DDP can support future re-implementation if the project is well-documented and all assets are preserved in a repository
Example
https://research.library.fordham.edu/ddp_archivingdossier/5/
- Note: If a web capture is part of your DDP plan, you can explore some usability differences between a web crawl through the Internet Archive and Webrecorder, using the “Hearing Modernity” project as an example. The Internet Archive tends to result in a smaller WARC file and is quicker to capture, with some quality control and potential patch-crawling. Webrecorder is a longer, manual process that yields a higher-fidelity capture and a larger WACZ file.
- Internet Archive (WARC format): https://wayback.archive-it.org/23926/20250130223928/https://hearingmodernity.org/
- Webrecorder (WACZ format): https://replay.digitalhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/archive/?source=s3%3A%2F%2Fdarth-sunsetting%2Fcrawls%2Fcollections%2Fhearingmodernityfull.wacz#url=https%3A%2F%2Fhearingmodernity.org%2F&ts=20250207212352
Preserving the entire project
Description: A pathway to preserving the full extent of a project, so it can be easily maintained or possibly reimplemented and studied by future generations. Drawing on a multidisciplinary examination of what enables technological longevity, The Endings Project created a model for programming approaches that ensure long-term usability of digital scholarly projects. This path requires full intellectual control of your data and infrastructure, which may not be an option for some projects that want to leverage emerging technologies, external data, or third-party integrations. While this pathway also minimizes medium-term maintenance and translates seamlessly to a long-term preservation solution, it still requires collaboration with an archival repository or other archival solution.
Characteristics of project candidates
- Ability to adhere to “Endings Principles,” such as using open formats, documented data models and rights, internally written/maintained/validated code, careful release management
- Is self-contained and does not require integration proprietary standards, boutique and/or server-side software, or external libraries
Socio-technical considerations
- Requires full intellectual control of all the project components, which may inhibit experimental technical innovations
- Compliance with “Endings Principles” for your data, links, code, and all other project components
Example
https://endings.uvic.ca/projects.html
- Note: This links to a directory of Endings-compliant projects