Explanation of Requirements

What is this Archive?

The Cultural Heritage Archive implements current best practices for the long-term sustainability of scholarly digital work. Directors and Digital Editors can use CHA servers to deposit a sustainable copy of their resources for safe keeping. But CHA can also host the primary public interface for a project, either after the main site obsolesces or right from the start. Romantic Circles is moving its resources here and will be shutting down the Drupal interface.

Hosting digital resources for both archiving and current use is possible because the Archive and the projects it hosts follow the recommendations made by the Endings Project.¹ This means that the resources and editions published here do not rely upon database software that can obsolesce. But without database functionality, there is little value added to a digital work: it might as well be a pdf, or for that matter, a printed book. To ensure that digital publications benefit from digital affordances, the Endings Project recommends building static search engines and has created a generator that enables Digital Humanities scholars without programming expertise to build these engines.

In addition to hosting working websites, the Archive protects them: all the resources deposited here are backed up nightly. Additionally, CHA's storage involves redundancy, adhering to the idea that "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe" (LOCKSS)². CHA regularly ports XML data to the Texas Data Repository, requiring only that projects adopt a Creative Commons Zero license (CC0).

What do I need to do for my project to be hosted and/or backed up in CHA?

1. Release your digital resource open access under a Creative Commons 0 license.³ Doing so may seem like giving away hard-earned intellectual property: what if other take credit for years of work? But truth be told, scholars are most in danger of illicit uses of the work they publish under copyright, in print — witness the lawsuits swirling around OpenAI. Publishing digital scholarship in the public domain turns out to be the BEST way to protect appropriation of one's research, and not only because of indelible digital timestamps. Insofar as CC0 licensed data is legally public, it cannot be patented or sold by individuals, universities, corportaions, states, or nations. And as for AI? Notice that when you perform a google search, the AI results link to the source, something AI cannot do if the material is in print.

2. Work with libraries, museums, and galleries as collaborators in preservation. Images can be stored here. However, whenever possible, projects should use IIIF protocols (see note 2 below) for page images of rare books and digitized artworks. This practice ensures that digital assets remain under control of the holding libraries / museums while displayed here, juxtaposed on the screen with their transcriptions, annotations, or scholarly essays.

3. Adhere to community standards and best practices that are designed to ensure archival preservation. In the case of a digital edition, for example, projects should be encoded in TEI; projects containing audio or video must follow the recommendations of AVAnnotate.⁴

4. Create a clear backend structure. Contributing projects will be asked to create a folder structure on the backend, as, for example, that pictured above, for the sake of readability by programmers of the future, even if no documentation accompanies the resource. CHA leadership will assist project directors in creating this uniform backend structure.

5. Create HTML-encoded interfaces for access to your documents. Because CHA is a static-server host, projects cannot be built in a way that requires a server to perform programming operations. Digital Editions, for example, must be created on a local computer. Prior to uploading in the repository,

• the project's TEI/XML will be transformed into web pages (HTML) using the transforms saved for posterity in a folder on the site,
• and the static search engine's json files and JavaScript input forms will be generated.

Will designing my edition for the Archive impede design creativity?

CHA's requirements involve paying attention to backend structure but do not limit the front end. The splash page for your archive (index.html) can be any design — it can even include video files, for example, as long as only css, js, and client-side media players are needed for proper display and the files are designed for preservation (see note 4 below).

The documents comprising your archive can be styled in any way you choose and designed for use by network-based software. For example, documents in the Criticism Archive can be annotated using hypothesis. Visit hypothes.is | Try it here

More Information

The edition will be made available on the web via CHA urls: https://cha.artsci.tamu.edu/[YourProjectName]; any domain name purchased for the project can be pointed to this permanent URL either immediately or after the main project site is retired. Because of their structure and licensing, the documents are easily discoverable by web search engines, ensuring that the documents will be findable. For projects with active sites elsewhere, web search returns from CHA can include redirects to the main project home.

Documentation

CHA provides contributors with technical documents usable as part of their sustainability plans for award and funding agencies, as well as documentation that the project has been peer reviewed. CHA can also provide letters 1) offering the details of a project's peer review (for Promotion, Tenure, the REF, etc.), and 2) promising collaboration for projects that are still in the planning stages or not yet completed.

Further Information

For more information, please email Laura Mandell.