I’m very grateful to Gary Price for alerting me to an important new report offering guidance in the preservation of new forms of scholarship which was recently issued. The report is on a New York University (NYU) web site, at
https://preservingnewforms.dlib.nyu.edu
However, the report represents a much broader community effort arising from a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project led by NYU. Quoting from the introduction to the report:
“To study this challenge, a group of digital preservation institutions, libraries, and university presses worked together on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project, Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Scholarship, led by New York University Libraries. Publishing organizations included NYU Press, Michigan Publishing, the University of Minnesota Press, UBC Press and Stanford University Press. Preservation service organizations included CLOCKSS, Portico and the libraries of the University of Michigan and NYU. Together, they examined a variety of enhanced ebooks and identified which features can be preserved at scale using tools currently available. Their findings, combined with the knowledge and research of experts in preservation, publishing, and copyright, resulted in this set of guidelines and best practices. These guidelines were organized and authored by: Deb Verhoff, Digital Collections Manager, NYU Libraries; Jonathan Greenberg, Digital Scholarly
Publishing Specialist, NYU Libraries / NYU Press; Karen Hanson, Senior Research Developer, Portico, ITHAKA. The PI for the project is David Millman, Associate Dean for Technology/Chief Information Officer, NYU Division of Libraries.”
This is a very valuable contribution to a critical set of problems that the community has largely avoided because they are so challenging, even though they absolutely must be addressed.
Here’s a useful supplementary piece
I’m hoping that we can include a report on this work as part of one of the events in the CNI Spring Member Meeting in March.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
