Kelli Bogan, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
Introduction
Owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA), George Washington’s Mount Vernon is a nonprofit historic site located in the United States and is dedicated to preserving, restoring, and managing George Washington’s estate as well as educating the public about its history and significance.
Mount Vernon’s digital archives program, established in 2024, is responsible for the stewardship of the organization’s digital materials, including the records of the MVLA and Mount Vernon. The program currently manages content across two on-premises digital servers and specialized cloud-based services.
Why we got involved in testing the DPC’s Carbon Footprint Toolkit
Our digital preservation program is still in its infancy and we are committed to developing and managing it in a responsible and sustainable manner. Understanding the impact of our practices and systems as they evolve will help us identify opportunities for improvement and make informed decisions about the future of the program.
We also wanted to represent the challenges and perspectives of medium-sized organizations and historic sites, which often have fewer resources for digital preservation than larger institutions. We have one staff member dedicated to digital preservation and a small IT team focused primarily on maintaining core systems and supporting operational continuity. While we are fortunate to have dedicated staff in both areas, our more limited resources make Mount Vernon a useful case for understanding how digital preservation approaches can be implemented with modest staff and infrastructure.
Lastly, like many smaller institutions, Mount Vernon is not currently a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition, but we regularly use its tools and resources to support our digital preservation work. Participating in this project allows us to contribute to a community whose expertise and resources we value, while advancing our commitment to digital preservation standards, solutions, and best practices.
What we chose to focus on
We chose to focus this study on our web archiving program, one of the first initiatives of the digital archives program. Its well-defined scope and growing body of content provide a useful dataset for examining the environmental impact of our practices.
Because automated web crawling through a cloud-based service is now our primary method of adding content to the web archive, we focused the study on this service and the systems and activities associated with it.
What we achieved
Our web archiving vendor provides a dashboard with information on crawls, uploads, storage, and usage history, giving us a starting point for understanding the scale and activity of our web archive. The service also provides a public-facing access portal, but we do not currently have information on how frequently users access it.
We contacted the vendor directly to request more detailed environmental data. They were receptive to our request and willing to investigate the information we needed. However, we learned that extracting data for an individual customer is a labor-intensive process for the vendor. At the time that this case study was written, we had not yet received the requested data.
Although we were not able to complete a full carbon calculation during the project period, using the toolkit helped us:
- identify the data needed for the assessment,
- understand the gaps in the information available to us, and
- clarify which data we can access directly and which depends on our vendor.
This provides a clear foundation for completing the calculation in the future.
Lessons learned
The project reinforced the importance of taking organizational capacity into account when assessing environmental impact. Our experience shifted our thinking from pursuing a single, highly precise carbon footprint number toward developing a repeatable approach to understanding and comparing the environmental impact of the systems and services we rely on.
For an institution of our size, regularly collecting highly detailed, customer-level data may require more staff time and effort than is practical, particularly when that data is also labor-intensive for vendors to produce. As the Toolkit itself notes, “Perfection is the enemy of the good here. Not all data are equal, and spending a lot of time and energy gathering really detailed data might contribute more to your carbon footprint than it would ever save.”
Next steps
Moving forward, we plan to focus on collecting environmental information at the vendor and service level and incorporating that information into future vendor evaluation and selection. This will allow us to compare systems, better understand vendors’ commitments to reducing environmental impact, and consider environmental factors alongside other procurement and service considerations. For example, our current vendor’s willingness to engage with our questions was itself a positive indicator and gave us greater confidence in continuing the relationship.
We also plan to investigate the energy associated with our complimentary manual web archiving activities so that we can better understand the environmental impact of activities that occur within our own institution, in addition to the services provided by vendors.