CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

  • About CNI
    • Membership
    • CNI Collaborations
    • Staff
    • Steering Committee
    • CNI Awards
    • History
    • CNI News
  • Program Plan
    • Current Program Plan
    • Program Plan Archive
  • Topics
  • Events & Projects
    • Membership Meetings
    • Workshops & Projects
    • Other Events
    • Event Calendar
  • Resources
    • Publications by CNI Staff
    • Program Plan
    • Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series
    • Videos & Podcasts
    • Follow CNI
    • Historical Resources
  • Contact Us

Toward Collaborative Models for Sustaining Digital Scholarship

Home / Project Briefing Pages / CNI Fall 2019 Project Briefings / Toward Collaborative Models for Sustaining Digital Scholarship

January 3, 2020

Katrina Fenlon
Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies
University of Maryland

Digital collections and projects created by humanities scholars constitute extensive, valuable, scattered bodies of historical and cultural evidence. Born outside of memory institutions, these collections and projects confront major barriers to sustainability. Though many at-risk digital collections and projects are within the scope of preservation missions of institutional libraries and archives, most institutions lack capacity to take in and sustain any more than a narrow swath of digital scholarship. Beyond that, research communities have deep investments in their collections; many seek new models of institutional partnership that keep varying levels of power over and responsibility for collections in the community’s hands. Libraries and archives cannot and should not comprehensively collect and sustain the growing mass of digital community collections. The “Sustaining Digital Community Collections” project aims to develop context-driven sustainability models, which share responsibility for the long-term care of digital projects among libraries and research communities. This project builds on a prior study of digital humanities collections, which found that sustaining digital collections depends on understanding and maintaining idiosyncratic, distributed, collaborative workflows of collection development and maintenance. In order to build sustainable infrastructures for the cultural record in a growing diversity of communities and institutions, we need an understanding of the human and technical workflows on which collections depend. This project is currently developing cases of three digital humanities projects-including a large-scale linked data hub, a unique corpus of Islamicate texts, and a local community archive–to document collaborative workflows of collection development and maintenance and identify roles that libraries and archives may play to help realize community-determined, community-led strategies for sustaining digital collections.

Presentation

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2019 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages
Tagged With: cni2019fall, Project Briefings & Plenary Sessions

Last updated:  Friday, February 28th, 2020

 

Contact Us

21 Dupont Circle
Suite 800
Washington, DC, 20036
202.296.5098

Contact us
Copyright © 2023 CNI

  • Copyright Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map

Keeping up with CNI

CNI-ANNOUNCE is a low-volume electronic forum used for information about the activities and programs of CNI, and events and documents of interest to the CNI community.
Sign up

Follow CNI

  • View cni.org’s profile on Facebook
  • View cni_org’s profile on Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo

A joint project