New Stanford Digital Repository tool helps SUP preserve and now also serve durable media in its digital publications. When it comes to digital web-based content, longevity can really only be accomplished if something is designed from the start to endure. But it’s difficult to predict what features, formats, and methods will last when they are
SUP is named as one of several collaborators in a new Mellon-funded initiative for digital content publishers and preservation services. Stanford University Press, specifically its digital initiative, is joining with a handful of other digitally progressive scholarly publishers to test the capacity and potential of some well-known preservation services including CLOCKSS and Portico in a
Creating an archive of an interactive scholarly work’s publication components in the Stanford Digital Repository is a time-intensive and collaborative effort. The source and content files of our first publication, Enchanting the Desert, have now been fully accessioned, deposited, and processed in the Stanford Digital Repository. Aside from the collection record itself and the referenced
With the IIPC panel still fresh in our minds, we’re looking forward to another opportunity to share our work, this time with a group a little less focused, perhaps, on digital preservation, but widely experienced in typical and emerging workflows for publishing. We learned last week that a proposed panel, organized by CLOCKSS’s Craig van
As is pretty clear by now, we’re spending a lot of time and energy in the pursuit of ensuring the digital work we’re publishing at SUP is just as long-lived as a typical scholarly monograph. We’ve zeroed in on three approaches, and the one that has been most successful so far is web archiving. So
“We are facing an archival moment” said Lorraine Daston recently in her talk “Big Science, Big Humanities and the Archives of the Year 3000”. The unease and uncertainty of this moment was palpable at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference in Wellington earlier this month. Web archiving is consumed with capturing content that is ever-changing, served
While complex web-based projects present challenges in the way of longevity—the average lifespan of a typical website is supposedly two to five years—there are measures that we’re taking to mitigate inevitable decay. In addition to our guidelines package and three-pronged preservation strategy, which we begin planning for before a project is even published, we’re also
Preserving the interactive scholarly works we’re publishing continues to be a high priority within the scope of our initiative. Over the past year and a half, the possible solutions have become clearer, though implementing the different methods is still one of our bigger challenges. So far we’ve identified and begun pursuing three specific strategies for
A few months ago, I wrote about my continued adventures in web-archiving our initiative’s first publication, Enchanting the Desert. I won’t repeat the details here, but essentially I came to the conclusion that Rhizome’s Webrecorder was the best tool for that job. It was able to capture some of the dynamic JavaScript that wasn’t being
When it comes to the format of interactive scholarly works, one size does not fit all. It’s been one of the greatest strengths and the greatest challenges of the kind of work we’re publishing under the Mellon-funded initiative. While other publishers, also in some cases with the help of the Mellon Foundation, are doing excellent
