Abstract
Ensuring the long-term availability of research data forms an integral part of data management services. Where OAIS compliant digital preservation has been established in recent years, in almost all cases the services aim at the preservation of file-based objects. In the Digital Humanities, research data is often represented in highly structured aggregations, such as Scholarly Digital Editions. Naturally, scholars would like their editions to remain functionally complete as long as possible. Besides standard components like webservers, the presentation typically relies on project specific code interacting with client software like webbrowsers. Especially the latter being subject to rapid change over time invariably makes such environments awkward to maintain once funding has ended. Pragmatic approaches have to be found in order to balance the curation effort and the maintainability of access to research data over time. A sketch of four potential service levels aiming at the long-term availability of research data in the humanities is outlined: (1) Continuous Maintenance, (2) Application Conservation, (3) Application Data Preservation, and (4) Bitstream Preservation. The first being too costly and the last hardly satisfactory in general, we suggest that the implementation of services by an infrastructure provider should concentrate on service levels 2 and 3. We explain their strengths and limitations considering the example of two Scholarly Digital Editions.
Highlights
with special regard to Scholarly Digital Edition (SDE) address different needs arising from varying usage scenarios and application architectures
Service level 2 is offered at the HDC in Göttingen
the curation effort preceding the transfer of research data to the infrastructure provider involves a lot of dedication on the part
Summary
Digital resources are becoming crucially important to the humanities. Products of digital scholarship, i.e. research data and publications, are no longer predominantly confined to the linear representation of text but include a wide spectrum of data types, from digital objects like images or audio files to databases and aggregated software environments. From our point of view as an infrastructure provider, research data has good prospects of being preserved for a long time if it can be dissected into singular digital objects like TIFF images and XML. Preserving an SDE basically means taking care of text encoded in TEI-XML, as well as possibly accompanying facsimiles in some image format, and a (web) application rendering all that information in a form deemed conducive to scholarly work by the creators of the SDE. Since the idea that certain properties of a digital object be deemed significant derives from resource constraints, this concept is central to the question of which service level for the preservation of an SDE is appropriate (and economically feasible). We present four potential service levels, ordered by increasing effort required on the part of interested scholars to work with the preserved research (Figure 1)
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