Executive Summary

Scholars are experimenting with increasingly diverse digital technologies to express their research. Publishers, in turn, are working to evolve their platforms and services to support publications that integrate dynamic features such as data visualizations, multimedia, maps, and more. In this effort to keep up with the creative demands of scholars, publications may evolve in ways that present a serious challenge to preserving or even sustaining them in the long term.

In a project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by NYU Libraries, a group of digital preservation institutions, libraries, and university presses collaborated to study examples of these dynamic forms of scholarship. There were two goals: Determine whether publications could be preserved in their current form and whether it would be possible to do this at scale, and use these findings to develop guidelines that will help authors and publishers to make these publications easier to preserve, and as a side-effect more sustainable.