From a UC Berkeley Library News Report by Rachael G. Samberg & Stacy Reardon:
Preservation of DH research outputs is critical for their future use, yet durable access questions often go unaddressed as DH projects take shape. Failure to account for projects’ enduring sustainability can leave gaps in cultural heritage and potentially eliminate years of scholarship and financial investments by funding organizations, institutions, and scholars.
To help avoid such scenarios, the UC Berkeley University Library and members of the Digital Humanities at Berkeley team (led here by Scott Paul McGinnis, Ph.D. student in history) hosted a recent event entitled Digital Humanities for Tomorrow, which sought to open the conversation about long-term preservation of the extraordinary DH projects being created at UC Berkeley.
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Participants in the discussion aired different views regarding what preservation of DH projects might look like.
- In cases in which DH projects lead to traditional outputs such as a journal article, preservation may be relatively straightforward, relying on depositing materials in institutional repositories to preserve project data, metadata, and the resulting scholarship.
- When DH projects include an interactive component or if they make use of web applications, we need to ask whether preservation means maintaining full functionality of the project or if alternative strategies, such as a combination of screencasts, screenshots, descriptions, interviews, and other documentation would suffice.
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