As Digital Production and Preservation Manager for Stanford University Press’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative, I want to tell the story of how we’re archiving and preserving the digital scholarly monographs we’re publishing, with the aim of identifying how each of our three approaches (web archiving, repository storage, and documentation) reframes the original publication’s story.
As part of a Mellon grant to develop a program for the publication of interactive web-based projects, Stanford University Press is employing three methods for persisting projects once they’re published: web archiving, repository storage of code and content, and in-depth documentation of the user experience. In this presentation, I will use the example of a recent SUP publication to demonstrate how each of these approaches privileges a unique version of the story comprising the published work. For example, a web archive preserves the interactive surface of the project, emulating a reader’s engagement with the content, thus foregrounding the polished publication for an audience whose primary interest is the project’s field of study. Alternatively, a repository collection offers access to the story told by the project’s underlying code and platform, serving the interests of researchers of digital architecture or history. Finally, documentation, including narrated screencast and written description of the user experience, removes the technical fragility and non-accessibility of the web archive or repository collection, telling yet another version of the story. While not providing a replicated experience or the raw files for reconstruction, documentation serves as an accessible description, albeit one recentralizing the author’s voice, for better or worse.
If a digital scholarly monograph, and the arguments it contains, is already itself a story, fraught with implications of author and audience, then its archived iteration is another story. The question is: what voices and audiences are inherently privileged in our approach to preserving these new works?
