Wayne Morse
Co-Director, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
Emory University
David Eltis
Robert W Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History
Emory University
The Slave Voyages research site is widely used “an average of 1,400 users a day in the last four months of 2019” but nevertheless faces the same sustainability problem that plagues all web projects built with soft money. How is it possible keep pace with changing operating systems, evolving best practices for user experiences, and at the same time meet the expectations of our diverse group of users? Project organizers believe the time has come to change the site’s organizational structure to facilitate answers to these questions and are using a consortium model to ensure sustainability while allowing for soft funds to be used to further research by all institutional and organizational members. The creation of the consortium has been very well received; however, in addition to operational challenges that were the primary factors for the consortium, there remain some new questions around implementing this model for the humanities. This session will present the factors driving the idea and provide a current status on the progress of building the consortium.
