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Digital Dissertations

This group is for anyone who is interested in writing a digital dissertation (or creating a digital component to an otherwise ‘traditional’ dissertation). Please join, introduce yourself in the “welcome and introductions” section, and keep the conversation going in the forums.

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  • preservation questions

    Posted by A.L. McMichael on February 27, 2013 at 9:30 pm

    Hi, all. I had an interesting meeting today with a digital scholar and librarian at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) about my digital catalog raisonne/database. They graciously offered to review my project for its Linked Data potential, but more importantly to this group, they raised some questions about preservation and sustainability.

    Their first question was whether CUNY has publicly agreed, explicitly and in writing, to host digital projects in perpetuity. Their advice was that projects need to be hosted at the same URLs in perpetuity, with consistent URIs and that each project should also be archived in a static, zipped file in an institutional repostiory.

    I know this group had some discussion about this at the digital dissertations meeting, and I’ve discussed sustainability with Aaron quite a bit. But I couldn’t remember–does CUNY have such an agreement regarding permanent digital archives? If so, we need to link to and promote it widely. If not, what can we do to accomplish this?

    Their questions were useful to me in that they were offering an outside perspective on what it will take for digital dissertations on Ancient World topics to be considered a stable and productive piece of scholarship. Could any of you comment on the archiving and preservation situation?
    Thanks!

6 replies
    • Stephen Klein
      Member
      February 28, 2013 at 11:06 am

      The library has investigated in preparation for this question.

      Essentially there are two approaches.

      We can license the following service.
      http://www.archive-it.org/
      Recommended by the Internet Archive. Library of Congress uses.

      Or implement Heritrix, the open source solution, but brings up some a larger question of what to preserve.
      Do we preserve:
      The files (if static site).
      Database (if database driven-OMEKA, WordPress, etc)
      The software version
      The CSS
      The particular server software (LAMP, Ruby & GEMS, etc.)

      I prefer a professional services so we do not need to get lost in the quagmire of these types of questions.

    • Stephen Klein
      Member
      February 28, 2013 at 11:06 am

      The library has investigated in preparation for this question.

      Essentially there are two approaches.

      We can license the following service.
      http://www.archive-it.org/
      Recommended by the Internet Archive. Library of Congress uses.

      Or implement Heritrix, the open source solution, but brings up some a larger question of what to preserve.
      Do we preserve:
      The files (if static site).
      Database (if database driven-OMEKA, WordPress, etc)
      The software version
      The CSS
      The particular server software (LAMP, Ruby & GEMS, etc.)

      I prefer a professional services so we do not need to get lost in the quagmire of these types of questions.

    • Matthew K. Gold (he/him)
      Participant
      February 28, 2013 at 12:15 pm

      Hi Alice Lynn —

      This question brings up some interesting practical and policy-oriented issues that we should discuss in more depth.

      > Their first question was whether CUNY has publicly agreed, explicitly and in writing, to host digital projects in perpetuity.

      I am not aware of any such commitment. Maybe others — Steve, Andrea, Josh — might have some thoughts on this?

      I’d also note that our forthcoming Institutional Repository might eventually answer some of these needs.

    • Andrea Ades Vasquez
      Participant
      February 28, 2013 at 4:19 pm

      For me, this raises 2 issues. First, when a student leaves the NML, their “project page” moves from “current” to “earlier, changing the url. This would be a problem if that is the only way someone may have reached the project. The good news is that the url of their full project site, if one exists, does not change. Second, We do tell students that their digital projects will remain accessible but I have never, in fact, asked or been told that this was guaranteed in perpetuity by the GC. Steve hasn’t either but we both assume that unless the GC disappears, we will indeed keep all of our projects up and running.

    • A.L. McMichael
      Participant
      March 22, 2013 at 2:39 pm

      Hi, Stephen.
      You mentioned at the NML meeting that the GC has licensed Archive It. Can you give us a little more information on what exactly that means for students? Does it operate like a server? Or will it archive a static version of the digital project (like a digital time capsule)? Thanks.

    • Stephen Klein
      Member
      March 24, 2013 at 10:27 pm

      Essentially the Internet Archives’ paid subscription service that ingests web sites at a specific point in time. Need to take a webinar to learn more, but will share once I know more.

6 replies

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