2019 Charleston Library Conference

The advance in technologies for publishing digital scholarship has outpaced the development of technologies for reliably preserving it. Authors and publishers are creating increasingly sophisticated products with enhancements that potentially put the preservability of valuable scholarship at risk.

As scholarly communication becomes more complex, publishers are creating digital products that are more than mere proxies for a print original; they offer new types of content and user experience. Features of these new forms of scholarship might include audio and video content embedded within text; interactive, high-resolution images, maps, and visualizations; annotations that can be shared, saved, and further annotated, privately or publicly; non-linear paths of engagement; and custom-built digital publications. Specific examples of this form of scholarship can be found in the Manifold platform developed by the University of Minnesota Press, Fulcrum of the University of Michigan Press, the RavenSpace initiative developed by UBC Press and the University of Washington Press, the interactive digital projects of the Stanford University Press, and Open Square of the NYU Press.

A single publication can potentially include many of the innovations mentioned. Each of these innovations presents preservation challenges; their combination creates an even greater challenge: the need to maintain multiple formats and the connections among them. This session will describe the in-progress work and findings of a collaboration among preservation organizations, libraries, and publishers that are creating enhanced digital publications. The project aims to identify what can be effectively preserved with existing technologies, and to produce a set of recommended practices to help authors and publishers prioritize and plan their enhanced digital products for maximum preservability.