This blog post was co-authored by Karen Hanson, Jonathan Greenberg, Thib Guicherd-Callin, Angela T. Spinazzè, and Scott Witmer.
Karen Hanson is Lead Research Developer at Portico/ITHAKA; Jonathan Greenberg is Digital Scholarly Publishing Specialist at NYU Division of Libraries; Thib Guicherd-Callin is Technology Manager at LOCKSS; Angela T. Spinazzè was Project Manager and is Principal of ATSPIN consulting; and Scott Witmer is Digital Preservation Specialist at University of Michigan Library. All were part of the “Embedding Team” for this research.
Over three years, with support from the Mellon Foundation, NYU Libraries led a project that embedded a team of preservation experts into the editorial and production workflows of nine publishers and three publishing platform developers. The publishers were creating what we described as complex or enhanced digital works, publications with features such as interactive visualizations, video, and non-linear navigation. The preservation partners joined early conversations about these works and offered feedback on how they could be made more preservable. The platform developers were managing or building systems to support such works and we met with them to assess how well their platforms supported preservation and to recommend improvements. In each case, we tracked which changes were adopted and how effective they were in improving preservability.
The work built on guidelines produced during an earlier project that analyzed already-published complex works to identify preservation challenges. These were used as a framework to provide feedback on the new publications and platforms. Preserving complex or interactive digital scholarship effectively can be difficult without significant attention at the project level. The initial guidelines aimed to clarify the limits of preservation tools and to show publishers, platforms, and content creators the kinds of process changes that can improve the odds of successful preservation even in the absence of preservation expertise on the project staff.
During the embedding process we saw some tangible successes. For example, an interactive timeline in the publication Owning My Masters (Mastered) was migrated to a format that could be preserved both as raw data and as an interactive WARC file. The Manifold platform implemented some of our suggestions to improve the ability of web archiving tools to preserve their site and enhanced the metadata for their exports. At the same time, some suggestions were considered too difficult to implement, but even in those cases the conversations raised awareness of how workflow choices affect preservation.
A key lesson was how strongly platforms shape preservation options. Publishers using content management systems like Fulcrum, Manifold, or PubPub often lacked the flexibility to implement advice directly. While major platform changes for preservation are unlikely, there are often opportunities to align publications with what platforms already support. We encouraged the platforms to be transparent about their preservation options (e.g., list what is included in their export packages) to empower content creators to align their work to those options. These dynamics underscored the need for closer collaboration not just between preservation experts and publishers, but also with the platforms themselves.
Another key lesson was in hearing what publishers and authors valued most in their publications and comparing that with what was actually preserved. This perspective often challenged our assumptions. For example, one author viewed an interactive menu feature as critical to the work, indicating the work would be like a “car without wheels” without it, while it could have seemed like an optional extra to someone outside the discipline. In another instance, we analyzed 3D visualizations assuming they would be important to the work, but the author indicated these were not critical and encouraged us to focus instead on the written text and the raw data associated with it. These cases highlighted the need to identify and prioritize the “core intellectual components” of a work in conversation with both publishers and authors and attempt to align it with what the platform can support for preservation.
During the process, publishers shared that while they valued the feedback, the guidelines were difficult to navigate and interpret without us as intermediaries. Based on this we released an updated set of guidelines and created a new resource: the Preservability Self-Assessment Tool. The tool aims to, in part, replicate the conversations we had during this work and help publishers, platform developers, and content creators evaluate preservation risks, identify relevant guidelines, and turn the guidelines into actionable steps.
The two projects underscore a familiar truth: preservation, especially of complex material, is far more difficult when it’s an afterthought. Outcomes improve significantly when the creation process is designed with long-term preservation in mind. Opportunities for preservation experts to influence the creation process are rare, but in scholarly publishing there are partners willing to listen and act within their means. By fostering conversations among authors, publishers, developers, and preservationists, we hope to move the needle on making complex publications more preservable. We hope the outputs of this project will help spark those conversations and support practical improvements in these environments.
Outputs of the two projects can be found in the NYU Digital Archive: https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/63332