Module 9 is an introduction to issues related to digital sustainability and preservation. As there is a significant amount of reading in this module, you are not expected to do any technical activities (but optional technical activities are listed in case you’re really excited about this subject).
Readings/Discussion
1. read Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)
2. read Jessica Otis, “Managing the Digital Backlist: Sustaining, Preserving, and Deleting Old Projects” The Dev Log (blog), March 13, 2023.
3. read Kaitlyn Tiffany, “Yahoo, the Destroyer: How the historic company became known as a bumbling villain of internet culture,” The Atlantic, April 25, 2021.
4. skim the Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue on Project Resiliency (17.1)
5. look at Alison Langmead, et al, “The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap”
6. skim Maxwell Neely-Cohen, “Century Scale Storage,” Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab
7. OPTIONAL: explore the Digital Documentation Process
8. OPTIONAL: Jonathan Zittrain, “The Internet is Rotting” The Atlantic
9. OPTIONAL: look at the Digital Library Federation/National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s “Levels of Digital Preservation”
10. participate in the class discussion
Technical Activities (Optional)
1. explore wget which I use at RRCHNM to archive our past project websites. You can get a thorough grounding in using wget from the Programming Historian tutorials “Automated Downloading with Wget” and “Applied Archival Downloading with Wget.” You can also read a very brief (but specific to website archiving) post by Peter Keen: “Archiving Websites with Wget.”
NOTE: for anyone who hasn’t used the command line before (especially if your computer is running a Windows OS) you should check out the “Introduction to the Bash Command Line” tutorial before trying to do anything with wget.
2. if anyone is especially interested in preservation and their group is not planning to continue developing their project after the semester ends, ping me about setting a time after the end of the semester/early next spring to “flatten” your project using wget, to make it Endings compliant (for as long as your group wants to keep it online)
3. if you have a paid Claude account, you have access to “Claude Code.” Experiment with using it to scrape your Clio website (you might have to whitelist your URL to allow Claude to access it) and rebuild it as plain HTML/CSS/JS or Hugo or another type of static site.