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Sustainability

Is it possible, then, that the answer (or at least an answer) to having digital scholarship accepted as equally legitimate and valid as a peer-reviewed article is the development of sustainable structures for our research? As Jerry pointed out, the framework we have for encouraging, publishing, and sustaining print-based humanities scholarship has become so embedded in the academic and institutional systems that support it as to be nearly invisible. This framework, developed over centuries with substantial institutional support, was not called into question until it began to break. One might have presumed that our non-digital colleagues might have looked to digital publication as a way out of the current difficulties; as a way of building new institutional structures to support in the first instance traditional research activities while exploring new models made possible by digital formats. But rather, the opposite has happened. There has arisen instead a bunker mentality clinging to the high old ways as assiduously as the British clung to the Raj.

Is the charge of the transience of digital scholarship warranted? Or is it our expectations that need to be adjusted? One example will suffice: the New Opportunities Fund, which operated in the UK from 1999-2004. NOF was a massive digitization program funded from the UK National Lottery Fund, awarding £50 million to 155 projects. Its goal was to digitize and make available resources for lifelong learning. Five years after the end of the program, Alastair Dunning carried out a survey to ascertain the fate of these projects. 1  The results of his survey are instructive:

• 30 websites exist and seem to have been enhanced since they launched;

10 have been absorbed into larger projects;

• 83 websites exist and seem to have remained unchanged since the project launch;  
• 31 have no available URLs or the URL does not seem to contain the digitized material.

According to a blog post by Dunning, opinions on the success of the program have been divided: “some have seen it as pioneering; others saw it as a poor use of money, which did not really reap the expected dividends.” 2   Although nearly 20 percent of the websites are no longer available, nearly 80 percent are, and when examining projects with more than £300k of funding, 87 percent are still available (34 of the 39 projects). 

If we compare this result to more traditional forms of print-based scholarship, these digitization projects are not doing too badly. We would not fault a traditional publisher if 83 out of 155 of their academic titles did not go into a second print run. However, if 40 of them did go into a second printing (the equivalent of the first two bullet points) with only 20 percent no longer in print five years later, the commissioning editor would be seen to have an outstanding track record. 

Rather than justify why less than 100 percent of the projects are still maintained as active research, perhaps we should be asking, as Jerry states in his opening talk, how do we ensure that digital scholarship remains part of the scholarly life-cycle? How do we ensure that the interfaces, web applications, or digital objects are maintained for future use by the scholarly community? We should be devoting more resources to the development of sustainable digital scholarship rather than accepting the fragility of the structures we create due to short-term or soft funding; resources that once created are situated outside the traditional funding and institutional structures in the humanities. Moreover we need to find long-term funding strategies for supporting the personnel and resources needed for these projects despite the fact that they are more typical of a science lab than a humanities project:  programmers, servers, web developers, metadata specialists, to name but the most obvious.