Hi Katie and all,

 

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com) is a collaborative international digital library with many partner institutions including libraries, archives, educational institutions, NGOs, scholarly communities, etc.  The planning for dLOC included planning for ongoing sustainability. This includes the ongoing role and importance of dLOC partners for governance, which includes all aspects of activities for projects within dLOC as they relate to ongoing programs, including reporting, assessment, promotion, new project phases, integration with research and teaching, integration with scholarly communities, new digital scholarship/humanities project development, and so on.  

 

For the technologies, dLOC has a central core infrastructure and technical host partner for full support for ongoing operations of all DH and data projects hosted with dLOC. dLOC did this to ensure that sustainability would be built-in for any new projects.  For new projects that need resources/functionality that the dLOC using SobekCM Open Source Software (www.sobekrepository.org) does not already support, the project is evaluated by members of the dLOC team to determine whether it’s a first-of-kind project or a one-of-kind project. A first-of-kind project that would build out wanted infrastructure that is needed more broadly. One-of-kind projects are unique to the project and where there are not other known needs/interests. If it’s a first-of-kind project, we work to find internal or grant resources to build out the new infrastructure needed, or to utilize, incorporate, and/or integrate other tools into the current technologies, procedures, workflows, etc. to support goals. Because one-of-kind projects are one-of-kind, we seek to find other communities/systems where the unique needs may not be so unique, where they can be an existing socio-technical community for support, or we discuss options and risks for taking boutique routes, which may absolutely be necessary for project needs, but may result in obsolence/loss.  

 

dLOC is one example of how sustainability for access, use, and preservation is done by and for a designated community (e.g., designated community of entities for Caribbean and circum-Caribbean material holdings, Caribbean Studies, and Caribbean peoples and communities, related..).  The need for a designated community is part of the system requirements for archival and preservation systems according to the OAIS reference model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_System). While many of the projects I work with are not always immediately discussing long-term preservation, the concept of the designated community and the following discussion on how all digital scholarship projects/programs have socio-technical aspects (for technologies, policies, peoples, and communities) for their initial and ongoing use, growth, and preservation has been really useful in my work. From your website (https://www.ersa.edu.au/service/data-management/rds-cultureandcommunity/), it looks like this is your background and what you’re already doing, so please forgive the redundancy on this and the long message. I’m trying to make sure I’m understanding the question in order to respond, so a lot of this is me mapping the connections for ongoing discussion and clarification.

 

For specific DH projects with dLOC and outside of dLOC, our project plan includes promotion and outreach from the start. If the projects are grant-funded, we have checklists for the pre- and post-award processes, which include convening a kick-off/celebratory first project team meeting, writing a press release and sending it out, standard venues for promoting and sharing work locally/regionally, and so on. This is one of the older lists of the process: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00013453/00001 and this is an example set of templates for presentations on the projects when they are digital collection-based: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00014814/00001. We found that having simple templates for normal needs, like press releases and PPT slideshow presentations, were incredibly helpful in supporting the subject matter experts and project team members in making the connections for them to do outreach initially, and then for scheduling ongoing outreach and promotion. For dLOC and projects outside of dLOC, my role is to integrate and leverage capacity wherever it exists, so I utilize the UF Digital Collections, powered by SobekCM (www.sobekrepository.org), which has automatic usage statistic reporting, user tools, is optimized for search engines for wide use/promotion, has record feeds to library catalogs, has microdata and sitemaps and APIs to feed/connect with other systems, and is integrated with our digital repository for ongoing digital preservation and access. I also heavily utilize UF Research Computing and High Performance Computing for other needs, with their many attendant supports, and with developing new project plans as needed and applicable, with those plans then shared and built-upon for other projects following the first-of-kind model for documentation and procedures in the same way as for the technologies.

 

I’m lucky to be at an institution where our digital and data activities developed as tightly coupled with broader impacts, preservation, and sustainability. The Ithaka S+R toolkit for developing institutional strategy for sustainably supporting DH projects is very useful for these considerations overall: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/sustainability-implementation-toolkit  

It may be too basic for the work that you’re doing, and it’d be great to learn more about your work and share resources on these needs.

 

Best wishes,

Laurie

 

Laurie N. Taylor, PhD

Digital Scholarship Librarian, University of Florida

& Technical Director, Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com)

UF DH Graduate Certificate Program: http://digitalhumanities.group.ufl.edu/

 

From: globaloutlookdh-l [mailto:globaloutlookdh-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Katie Hannan
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 2:16 AM
To: A list for participants in the ADHO DH Global Outlook Community <globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca>
Subject: [globaloutlookDH-l] Promotion & sustainability of Digital Humanities project sites

 

 

Hi All,

 

I've been reading posts from this list for a while but haven't posted before. My name is Katie Hannan, hello! I'm a data librarian, online projects person, in Adelaide, South Australia and I'm currently working as a time-share data librarian at Flinders University, Education, Humanities and Law Faculty and eResearch SA.

 

I'm interested to hear from anyone who has a promotional strategy for their Digital Humanities projects.  Do you build it and hope that they will come? Do you build it, promote it and then shove it in a corner and forget about it when the next lot of grant funding comes through? Do you have any reporting requirements for operational DH sites or any requirement to monitor access and use?

 

I am working on some project documentation for some new DH projects, but when I moved into this role I inherited some DH projects that are now in operational stage. They're just ticking along nicely in the background, but may need some system upgrades in the future, but the grant money is long finished.

 

I'd like to hear your thoughts on what happens when the grant money runs out, the project is launched and then....? What happens when the software doesn't work as well as it should? When there's security holes in older versions of content management systems.

 

Thanks!

 

Katie

 

-- 

Katie Hannan

eResearch Project Officer, Cultural Collections, Flinders University