Since spring 2019, a group of digital preservation institutions, libraries, and university presses have been working together on a Mellon funded project led by New York University Libraries. The project aims to investigate the preservability of a variety of enhanced digital scholarly books to identify which of their features can be preserved at scale using tools currently available, and which are likely to be lost over time. Enhanced monographs can include features such as embedded visualizations, multimedia, data, complex interactive features, maps, annotations, and in some cases they may depend on third-party platforms or APIs, such as YouTube or Google Maps.
One goal of the project is to combine the research findings from two established preservation institutions with the knowledge and research of experts in preservation, publishing, and copyright to produce a set of guidelines. The guidelines will provide advice to publishers and scholars for creating enhanced monographs that are more likely to be preservable, or at least ensure that the implications of adding certain features are clear so that alternative paths can be taken when possible.
The first phase of the project focused on EPUB3 ebooks that include a variety of multimedia and supplementary material. The second phase looked at a number of web-based publisher platforms that support enhanced features such as annotations, embedded multimedia and visualizations, and other supplemental material. The final phase featured much more complex dynamic works that depend on large datasets or whose platform and presentation are an integral feature of the work. Recommendations will be published in spring 2021.