CHA: Explanation of Requirements

Sustainability

Storage and Access: The Cultural Heritage Archive Project 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 or to set up the primary public interface for a project that is designed from the start for optimal sustainability.

Functionality: In keeping with recommendations from the Endings Project,¹ CHA does not rely upon database software that can obsolesce. For each contributing project, CHA generates a static search engine based upon each project's needs. Static search engines only require the software updates that are necessary for any and all servers providing browser-accessible public web space.

You can see the static search engine at work on the Mary Leapor project search page.

Additional Sustainability Measures: In addition to nightly backups, CHA's storage involves redundancy, adhering to the idea that "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe" (LOCKSS; see note 1 below). CHA regularly ports XML data to the Texas Data Repository, requiring only that projects adopt a Creative Commons Zero license (CC0).

Intellectual Property: The Creative Commons 0 license puts data firmly in the public domain. 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 seized, appropriated, patented, or sold by individuals, universities, corportaions, states, or nations.

Images: Whenever possible, we will use IIIF protocols 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 TEI transcriptions or scholarly essays.²

Sustenance through Code Clarity and Structure

Contributing projects will be asked to create a basic folder structure on the backend, pictured above, for the sake of readability by programmers of the future. 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 the xslt folder,
• and the static search engine's json files will be generated — again, all prior to uploading the project into the CHA public server space.

File types and Design:The XML, image, and HTML documents can have ANY names and internal identifiers, and be encoded in ANY way, needing only to be the required file type (html, xml, png, jpg, etc.). The "search" folder contains json files, and IIIF manifests in json may be saved in the images folder as well. The XML folder will include the schema file(s) as well as, ideally, documentation about editiorial coding decisions. The documents comprising your archive can be styled in any way you choose.

For an example of project-specific coding, documents in the Criticism Archive can be annotated using hypothesis. Example

(Visit hypothes.is for more information.)

The splash page for your edition (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.

The edition will be made available on the web via CHA urls: https://cha.artsci.tamu.edu/[YourProjectName]. Projects may choose to use re-directs in the CHA version that take users to the active project site unless and until that main site is no longer actively maintained. At that point, project directors can redirect their project URL to a page informing users of the CHA instance and the new URL. Because of their structure and licensing, the documents are easily discoverable by web search engines, ensuring that the documents will be findable.

CHA leadership will assist project leaders and/or perform necessary procedures for creating this uniform backend structure.

Documentation

CHA provides contributors with technical documents usable as part of their sustainability plans for award and funding agencies. 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.

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