Great lengths: a review of website preservation activities at three American Universities with digital humanities centers

Abstract

Abstract Sustaining grant funded digital humanities websites has become a major challenge in the field. Three American universities with digital humanities centers kept eight of nine websites funded by the United States National Endowment for the Humanities (1996–2003) online to 2022. Center personnel made website preservation a part of everyday operations without additional funds devoted to the task. Web software developed rapidly in this period, however and center staff members’ efforts often did not succeed in providing necessary updates. Funded materials became increasingly obsolete. The extent of center personnel’s efforts, compared with their results, suggests that their approach itself will in many cases prove unsustainable. In one case, a university shifted responsibility for a popular website to its library. The library completely rebuilt it, only to find that the resource had again become obsolete less than 10 years later. Reconstruction should therefore be understood as an ongoing process, and its cost and complexity suggest that many online resources will not benefit from it. A new approach converting websites to a static state can facilitate sustainability at lower cost, but it also requires resources for implementation. Two American funding agencies have recently made grants available for website preservation and reconstruction. Similar organizations in other parts of the world have not followed suit and should consider doing so. In the absence of a comprehensive effort to identify and evaluate legacy websites for preservation, the competitive process of securing grant awards can begin to determine which legacy websites will survive.