POST: Assessing Preservability in New Forms of Scholarship

A recent guest post on the H-Net Book Channel titled “Assessing Preservability in New Forms of Scholarship” shares some outcomes of the Embedding Preservability project, the second project led by NYU Libraries to address preservation risks for complex digital publications. The authors note that this Mellon-funded project had two broad goals:

“The first goal was to test the assumptions of the guidelines [“Guidelines for Preserving New Forms of Scholarship”] by determining how easy they are to implement in a range of scenarios. The project embedded a team of preservation experts into various publishing workflows and used the guidelines to provide advice about improving the preservability of a project the publishers were currently working on. … The team used the evidence gathered to reach the second goal, which was to iterate on the guidelines document and release a second version that had been tested within the publishing workflow.”

The post goes on to share further details about the project’s workflows and details on the Preservability Self-Assessment Tool which the project team developed “to enable publishers, platform developers, creators, and anyone else interested in working with complex digital projects to assess risks to preservation in their own environment.”

The post was authored by Jonathan Greenberg (NYU), Thib Guicherd-Callin (Stanford University), Karen Hanson (ITHAKA), Angela Spinazzè (ATSPIN consulting), and Scott Witmer (University of Michigan). Find the full post at Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications, available on the H-Net Book Channel.