One of my first projects as digital production associate for the works being published under SUP’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative was to create a set of technical guidelines. It has proven to be a complex undertaking and one that is unearthing many philosophical questions and considerations. Over three months of work on these documents, which will be

Not too long ago we used word processors to write documents on computers. The act of writing itself was called “word processing.” The excitement around the revolutionary new technology (first electric typewriters, then computer applications) inspired a new name for writing, defined by the instrument with which we produced it. Now the technology has become common

Part of any publisher’s production workflow is registering published items with identifiers of various kinds. For traditional books these identifiers includes things like ISBNs and other cataloging descriptors like OCLC numbers and Library of Congress call numbers. With the advent of digitized texts came the addition of Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs. Assigning all these

It’s been widely noted that the typical website lasts roughly three to five years. One of the goals of SUP’s Mellon grant is to mitigate that inevitability by exploring a range of preservation approaches for the web-based works we’re publishing. While documentation is a necessary component of archiving digital content, an ideal archive would also

I spent last week at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute on the UVic campus in Victoria, British Columbia. It was one of many DHSIs that are held all over the world each summer. In addition to giving a presentation on SUP’s Archivability Guidelines, one of several guidelines we’ve created to guide our authors toward responsible and sustainable digital development,

Over the two years since we first announced our Mellon-funded initiative to develop a publishing program for born-digital scholarly projects, we have learned and achieved quite a bit. And while we might have been a bit quiet on the blog about our progress during that time, we’ve been busy developing our program and we’re now eager to