CNI Spring 2020 Virtual Membership Meeting

Over the last year, a group of digital preservation institutions, libraries, and university presses have been working together on a Mellon funded project led by New York University Libraries. The project aims to investigate the preservability of a variety of enhanced digital scholarly books to identify which of their features can be preserved at scale using tools currently available, and which are likely to be lost over time. Enhanced monographs can include features such as embedded visualizations, multimedia, data, complex interactive features, maps, annotations, and in some cases they may depend on third-party platforms or APIs, such as YouTube or Google Maps. One goal of the project is to combine the research findings from two established preservation institutions with the knowledge and research of experts in preservation, publishing, and copyright to produce a set of guidelines. The guidelines will provide advice to publishers for creating enhanced monographs that are more likely to be preservable, or at least ensure that the implications of adding certain features are clear so that alternative paths can be taken when possible. So far a selection of EPUB and web-based publications have been investigated and some initial findings have emerged. The session will bring together representatives from university presses and preservation institutions. The publishers will showcase some of the innovative e-books that have been produced, and the preservation institutions will respond with their findings about the preservability of those works. The preservation institutions will highlight publisher practices that enhanced the preservability of the works, as well as offer initial suggestions for further improvements. Finally, the panel will reflect on potential broader implications for scholarly output that may not flow through traditional publishing organizations, such as digital humanities projects and research data.
https://www.cni.org/topics/digital-preservation/preservation-of-new-forms-of-scholarship