Preservation Objectives
Managing expectations
Following established practices led by the preservation service providers, we began our work by asking publishers to articulate their goals for each publication. They identified the content and functional elements that we would attempt to preserve, and these served as the criteria upon which we planned and evaluated subsequent preservation activities. The instructions and context necessary for the playback or reading experience of the material submitted also helped capture their expectations for what the intended audience should be able to experience when the archived content is made available. This process allowed the preservation service provider to focus their work on what was deemed essential and to determine the best method for transferring content from the publisher.
Defining a work and the elements to be preserved
The publications considered during this project ranged in complexity from enhanced, web-based renditions of EPUBs to complex web publications with interactive, dynamic features. Some of the web based publications make use of platforms that have a consistent, finite, and fairly predictable set of interactions. The more complex web publications embed dynamic features which drive unpredictable interactions with a server such as full text searching, complex data filtering, map navigation, adding highlights or annotations.
During the project, a total of 18 publications were analyzed. Six of the publications are described below to provide examples of the kinds of publications that were included in the project and the criteria for preservation.
By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism is an EPUB-based work published on NYU Press's Open Square platform. It is a version of the paper edition of the same book that has been enhanced with embedded video. The main criterion for successful preservation from the publisher was to preserve the text, images and video elements so that a user can read the book in sequential order. Ideally, users should be able to view the media at the appropriate location within the text; however, a less seamless user experience would be acceptable. The embedded videos are hosted on YouTube, and not in the control of NYU Press or the author. The publisher was able to transfer a submission information package with an EPUB file and accompanying metadata, but not files of the referenced videos. In some instances, the external video content had already been removed from YouTube by the time our project began.
99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto is a University of Minnesota Press title published on Manifold. It consists of five project texts which include annotations and highlights from users who opt to share them publicly. The publisher’s expectation was that these features would be captured and embedded into the preservation copy of the work at the same anchor points at which they exist in the original Manifold edition. Future users are also meant to understand the overall structure of the work. Another University of Minnesota Press project, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments of History, includes a draft chapter from the forthcoming book of the same title, as well as 124 individual project “resources.” Among these are spreadsheets, images, and links that resolve to a Twitter query for the project's hashtag.
A Mid-Republican House From Gabii is a University of Michigan Press title which displays EPUB-based text alongside a WebGL visualization that allows users to explore an interactive 3D rendering of the archaeological site described in the text. In this work, a user can click on links in the text that will display the corresponding location in the 3D model, and similarly, clicking on the model brings a user to the corresponding pages in the text. This relationship between the text and the 3D visualization was noted by the publisher as a central element for preservation. Additional objectives were to preserve supplemental images and tables, the 3D model itself and an external database referenced in the work.
As I Remember It: Teachings (ʔəms tɑʔɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder is a media rich publication on RavenSpace, a Scalar-based platform developed by the University of British Columbia Press that “embraces collaboration, respects Indigenous protocols, and uses digital tools in imaginative ways to make knowledge accessible and shareable across communities and generations.” The work, which includes interactive maps, audio, and video in a non-linear presentation, represents joint scholarship between Tla’amin elder Elsie Paul, historian Paige Raibmon, and members of Paul’s family. The publishers identified the audio and visual content to be of critical value to this work. In addition to preserving media in relation to the text, other essential features included the “Protocol for being a respectful guest” popup message presented to all visitors to the site, interactive pop-up notes for key terms, navigation pathways nested in multi-path structure, and a custom keyboard for Indigenous languages.
Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China is a publication from Stanford University Press which relies heavily on an interactive map that displays alongside the text. Linkages to sections of text define changes in the map view and focus point. Users can navigate through the map to discover data at different moments in time or in specific date ranges. The map also provides access to source data via references to particular newspapers and articles reporting the information mapped in the publication. These interactive elements were deemed essential to the work. As the publisher stated in the Acceptance Criteria, “To lose the map is to lose what matters about this publication.”
Existing preservation-oriented features of publication platforms
Most of the publications reviewed during this project are published on open source platforms designed for publishing new forms of scholarship. These platforms allow authors to integrate audiovisual media, digital supplements, and interactive features such as data visualizations with textual content. One of our research objectives was to consider the role platforms might have in scaling the preservation of complex digital publications.
Fulcrum was built on the same Samvera stack as the University of Michigan Library’s Deep Blue institutional repository and is governed by the same preservation policies. The platform was built with an express intention that the materials would be durable and accessible over time. During the course of this project, we considered the durability of relationships and interactivity between textual content and related digital resources.
Manifold was designed as a digital publishing platform for iterative as well as conventional publications. Its export feature converts textual content as well as the project materials to a ZIP archive that conforms to the BagIt specification. Other features such as the platform’s user-contributed content, supplements embedded from third party platforms, and some of the relationships between the resources and content are not fully expressed in the standard export function. Similar to Fulcrum works, we focused on preserving the relationships between the text and media enhancements and also explored preserving some of the enhanced features that are integrated into the platform.
Scalar, a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, is an authoring and publishing platform designed to allow for flexibility in structuring media rich works. Publications can be exported as RDF-JSON or RDF-XML as a backup of text components, metadata, and relationships among text and non-text components. The export feature is designed to facilitate the migration of projects from one Scalar install to another. During this project, we considered the export function as a tool for preservation. As with other platforms, we focused on preserving the relationships between elements in a work as well as some of the interactive and experiential aspects of these dynamic publications.