Accessibly Preserved:

Depositing your digital resource in the Cultural Heritage Archive provides permanent preservation, not only on University servers, but also in the Texas Data Repository. Even while archived here, your preserved copy can still be accessed, viewed, read, searched, and generally enjoyed by the public.

You are welcome to download a plain-text file of "Preservation Strategies" for use in grant applications requiring a sustainability plan.

Preservation Strategies:

Sustainability Summary: The Texas A&M Cultural Heritage Archive is a repository for TEI-encoded digital resources hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences and the University Libraries at Texas A&M. All participating projects conform to the sustainability principles articulated by the Endings Project at the University of Victoria. In keeping with those recommendations, the Archive is hosted on a static server. In addition to nightly backups, CHA involves redundancy, adhering to the idea that "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe" and so regularly ports XML data to the Texas Data Repository which requires the Creative Commons 0 license (CC0).

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 use CHA servers to deposit a sustainable copy of their resources and/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, 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.

Accessibility: All HTML interfaces for contributing projects adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) and have been tested using the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool or WAVE (https://wave.webaim.org/); they have a WAVE score of 9 or more.

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; Stanford University Libraries). CHA regularly ports XML data to the Texas Data Repository which requires the Creative Commons 0 license (CC0).

Intellectual Property: Every CHA project is released with a Creative Commons 0 license (CC0) which 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, contributing projects do not store images in the Archive but instead IIIF protocols (Stanford University Libraries) 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.

Video: Project videos are viewable via client-side apps and are prepared using the AVAnnotate workflow.

Sustenance through Code Clarity and Structure: Contributing projects are structured on the backend in a manner that will be legible to future programmers even in the absence of a readme file: all folder names have semantic meaning indicating their contents; the structure itself makes relative paths comprehensible at a glance.

Peer Review: All contributing projects have been peer-reviewed by the Advisory Board and its delegates. The reviews or summaries of peer reviews are publicly available.