The Endings Project: Principles and Recommendations Concerning Digital Longevity

The Endings Project at the University of Victoria has established a set of principles and recommendations concerning "digital longevity": how to plan and build digital projects in ways that anticipate and ease their eventual conclusion. The Women Writers Project at Northeastern University came to these principles late, but as part of sustainability planning has recently assessed them in relation to the needs of larger digital publication projects, using the WWP publications as test cases. This three-paper session will report on our technical analysis and adaptation of the Endings principles, the implications for the WWP's publications, and the implications for the larger set of projects supported by the Northeastern University Digital Scholarship Group. The session will begin with a presentation by Ash Clark focusing on the technical rationale for the Endings Principles and what they are designed to achieve. This presentation will consider how specific components (such as databases, search systems, code libraries, and stylesheets) function and how they affect the longevity and resource consumption of digital projects. It will also lay out the types of static-site approaches that the Endings Project recommends, and lay a conceptual groundwork for the other two presentations. The second presentation, by Sarah Connell, will focus on the Women Writers Project's analysis of the Endings Principles, and in particular on how the WWP is moving towards applying these principles to WWP publications as part of the project's long-term sustainability planning. These publications were designed to make the most of large-scale, dynamic data sets and to enable complex forms of data analysis and visualization. In their current form, although the data has been designed with the Endings Principles strongly in mind, these publications rely on tools such as XML databases and external code libraries which are deprecated by the Endings Principles. They also rely on specific expertise profiles of staff who have been with the project for many years and in some cases decades, but who now are close to retirement. The presentation will take a close look at how the WWP is planning to rearchitect and scale back the technical complexity of its publication platforms, and move the project away from reliance on specific individuals. The third presentation, by Julia Flanders, will discuss how these issues play out in the larger context of the Digital Scholarship Group. In keeping with the Endings Principles, DSG has generally placed emphasis on high-quality data as the basis for project design and life-cycle planning, but the group is now considering how to manage the use of platforms including WordPress, Omeka, and static-site systems in ways that enable the data to speak effectively through platforms, move gracefully between platforms, and remain visible even after the project is no longer being actively supported. Ash Clark is the XML Applications Developer in the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University. Sarah Connell is Associate Director of the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, and Associate Director of the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. Julia Flanders is Professor of Practice and Director of the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University.