Don't lose all that hard work you've put into creating a digital scholarship project! With all the moving parts involved, digital scholarship projects can “break” two or three years after completion when preservation concerns aren’t considered. Websites require maintenance, platforms like Omeka and StoryMaps need version updates, file formats become obsolete – making projects interactive and accessible over the long-term can be complex.

In this roundtable discussion, we’ll explore challenges in preserving digital scholarship projects, as well as tools & approaches to supporting their long-term access and use. We’ll conclude with a sandbox session where we share case studies and respond to participant questions.

Details: This online workshop will be recorded. The recording will be posted to the Sherman Centre's Online Learning Catalogue.

Facilitator Bios:

John Fink is Digital Scholarship Librarian at McMaster University. 

Chelsea Miya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She has held research positions with the SpokenWeb Network, the Kule Research Institute (Kias), and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC). She co-edited the anthology Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers 2021), and her article “Student-Driven Digital Learning: A Call to Action” appears in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center (MIT Press 2021).

Devon Mordell is an educational developer with the MacPherson Institute, drawing on her experience in media art, hobbyist programming and instructional design to teach workshops for the Sherman Centre. She has also trained as a digital archivist and given workshops on digital exhibits and computational text analysis for the Canadian archival community.

Isaac Pratt (he/him) is a research scientist by training and has a PhD in Anatomy & Cell Biology. He leverages nearly a decade of interdisciplinary research experience to help support students, staff, and faculty. His expertise lies in questions surrounding data storage, security, planning, archival, and sharing. Isaac also provides support and curation services for McMaster Dataverse. His other interests include reproducible research methods, open science, and data science.

Bridget Whittle is the Digital Archives Librarian and has worked at McMaster since 2012. Bridget holds an MA in Medieval Studies and a MISt in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto. The focus of her work touches on the many places the digital world and archives intersect--archiving born-digital content, managing digitized materials, and exploring new tools created by technology to explore and expand our access to archival material.