What are we talking about when we talk about sustainability of digital archives, repositories and libraries?

Abstract

This paper reports on how LIS authors depict the concept of sustainability of digital archives, repositories and libraries in English language texts from 2000--2015 indexed in three major LIS databases. Our results show that sustainability is not as popular a topic as one might expect. Results show that most authors discuss sustainability at a superficial level rather than in-depth. Sustainability is a multi-faceted concept, and we explore the prevalence of nine codes, representing different facets of sustainability, in the texts. We found most authors discussed sustainability in terms of technology, management, relationships or revenue. Fewer described assessment, disaster planning or policy facets. We also describe the range and variation in subthemes we encountered within each code. We conclude with suggestions for advancing conversation about organizational sustainability in the LIS literature.