News – Embedding Preservability

How preservable is your Complex Digital Project?

Introducing a Self-Assessment Tool

Embedding Team members Jonathan Greenberg, Angela Spinazzè, Thib Guicherd-Callin, and Scott Witmer traveled to Ghent, Belgium to participate in iPRES2024 where they facilitated a workshop that introduced a draft version of a Self-Assessment tool that is being developed as an additional deliverable of this research.

Embedding Team Members Jonathan, Angela, Thib, and Scott at a workshop at iPRES2024 in Ghent, Belgium.

The tool is a response to a need identified by publisher and platform project partners. The embedding process revealed that they were willing to take some action towards improving preservability earlier in the production process. However, due to the overwhelming nature of the Guidelines in their current form, they needed the embedding team’s assistance in order to effectively do so. As a result, the design of the Self-Assessment tool is based on the embedding process. It is grounded in a series of conversations intended for project team members, authors, engineers, software developers, and other allies to engage in over time.

The purpose of the tool is threefold:

1. Identify preservation risks within complex works
2. Guide those involved in content creation towards suggestions for improving preservability of their work
3. Reduce the risk of loss

Embedding Team Member Scott Witmer sets the context for the workshop at iPRES2024.

At iPRES2024, the goal was to both introduce the tool to potential new users and to learn from experts in the field of digital preservation how useful a tool such as this would be for them in their work environments. Participants represented a broad range of organizations such as national preservation networks, university libraries, and service providers as well as roles including digital collection archivists, software preservation technologists, project managers, researchers, digital archiving engineers, digital preservation archivists and librarians.

Participants worked in small groups using the Self-Assessment tool. Embedding Team member Jonathan Greenberg answers one small group's questions.

Participants worked in small groups using the online version of the Self-Assessment tool.

This is the second workshop where a draft version of the tool has been introduced. It is being updated after each experience. We anticipate an official launch in early 2025.

Workshop at iPres 2024

How Preservable is your Complex Digital Project? Introducing a Self Assessment Tool

Join us at 14:00 on September 16, 2024!

We invite you to experiment with a new Self Assessment Tool that identifies preservability risk factors for complex works and offers recommendations to content creators that could improve your project’s preservation outlook.

This 2-hour workshop is designed for anyone preserving complex works (or interested in doing so) that may need to assess their preservability. It is especially relevant to those who interface with content creators and have opportunities to give feedback to improve preservation outcomes – for example, those working with digital humanities researchers.

We are excited to share our work and to provide an opportunity for attendees to experiment with this new tool that is a result of five years of research into the preservability of new forms of scholarship!

Download the abstract to learn more.

Embedding Team at Society for Scholarly Publishing conference in May!

Improving the Preservability of your Complex Digital Publications

Join us on Thursday, May 30th, Session 3F at 4:00pm

New forms of scholarship are characterized by a variety of digital enhancements such as audio, video, complex data visualizations,and nonlinear navigation. The combination of elements, how they are described, where they reside, how they are licensed, and the role they playin supporting the scholarly argument, pose challenges with regard to preservability.

We invite you to join us in Boston where we will present scenarios from our research illustrating difficult to preserve features, identifying recommendations found in the Guidelines for Preserving New Forms of Scholarship, highlighting successes that improved the long-term preservability of those features, and demonstrating design choices that can be made to address these. Participants will work in small groups on one of the challenges; contributing their experiences to facilitate dialogues around obstacles they faced, additional actions to support enhanced preservability, and who has a role to play in the process.