Today I led a meeting of Harvard Library’s Digital Stewardship Reading Club, an informal, monthly gathering of colleagues facilitated by our Digital Preservation Services team. Discussion focused on the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, particularly “Section A: Project Survey.”
About the roadmap
University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop, a digital humanities lab located within Pitt’s History of Art & Architecture department, with close ties to both the university library and iSchool, received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create a sustainability plan for the future of the scholarly website “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture.” When this resource was created in 1995, it was essentially a digitized slide collection for classroom use. Over time it grew into a scholarly collection that users relied on for lots of different purposes. In addition to planning for the sustainability of this one site, the folks at Pitt’s Visual Media Workshop made their framework for sustainability planning available for others to use as the The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap. Essentially, the Roadmap is what the “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture” project team wished they’d had to guide their sustainability planning since the site first came to be in 1995.
Today our discussion centered around Section A: Project Survey, which guides project teams to answer questions like:
- What’s the scope of your project?
- How long do you want your project to last?
- Who is the project designed for?
- What are the project’s sustainability priorities?
- What’s on your project’s documentation checklist?
Applications to our team’s work
Harvard Library’s Digital Collections Discovery team includes Vanessa Venti, Anna Van Someren, and myself. Team members have already shepherded lots of migrations of bespoke digital collections sites to CURIOSity Digital Collections, starting with all the collections whose migration Vanessa coordinated when CURIOSity was first launched, to the Worlds of Change migration on which Anna took point. For Worlds of Change, Anna’s first step was to analyze the feasibility of migration to CURIOSity, including what would be gained and what would be lost.
I have suggested that our team adapt elements of the Roadmap for use in future gap analyses. Module A3: Who is the project designed for? and Module A4: What are the project’s sustainability priorities? offer particularly helpful frameworks for articulating what features of an existing site serve the needs of its user communities. We could then analyze which of these features are currently supported in CURIOSity, to inform decisions about whether or not to migrate.
Discussion
Questions for discussion included:
- Has anyone encountered the Roadmap or used it in your work? If so, tell us about it!
- What content from the Roadmap (especially Section A) do you think is most useful for people who create and sustain scholarly digital projects? What important concepts or considerations are missing, if any?
- The main use case the Roadmap’s authors envisioned was in-person multi-day workshops for digital humanities project teams facilitated by sustainability experts. What other use cases can you imagine?
- Based on other use cases, how might you adapt the content or structure of the roadmap? For example, sharing a handout in a consultation, or incorporating into reports as our team is considering.