Land of the Lost: Digital Projects and Longevity

Co-authored with Stephanie Pettigrew, digital goddess.

Special thanks to Krista McCracken for the information on web archiving!

We all have our #TeachingFail moments. One of Andrea’s most memorable moments happened when she was in the middle of a lecture on World War II. She had planned to show an adorable clip from CBC from the 60th anniversary of VE Day celebrations, which told the love story between a Canadian soldier and his Dutch bride who met during the storied Summer of Love (the 1945 version, not the 1969 version). She was super excited, since (if you can’t tell), she loved the clip. But it wouldn’t load. What’s worse, when she tried Google, it told her that the link no longer existed. Andrea was aghast. And that’s how she learned that CBC only keeps its online videos available for six years. While she was able to later access it through their CAMPUS service, her ability to play it in a classroom now depends on whether or not the institution she works for has a subscription.

This brings us to our point: we need to start thinking about digital permanence and historical digital projects. Archivists and historians have bemoaned the digital age for as long as we can remember, quite rightly. When it comes to the amazing online resources that historians have created over the last ten years, few of us think about the long-term viability of these digital projects. For the most part, we launch an online collection of material, and then think that our work is done. The site chugs along well for a while, and, as time moves on, so does the digital work, until the digital project becomes increasingly difficult to use and/or obsolete, before vanishing into the interwebs of time. So in today’s blog post, we’re going to do a few things: talk about the issue of historical digital projects and digital longevity; make the argument that we need to be better about ensuring that our work remains accessible; discuss some of the ways you can ensure that your digital project has longevity; and provide suggestions on what to do when your favourite digital project dies.  

*To be clear, by digital projects we are referring to any type of online entity, including, but not limited to: websites, blogs, digital archives, online exhibits, interactive maps, and so on.

Digital Projects Are Not Like Books

Most historians have a fairly intimate connection with the printed word. Many of us are bibliophiles, and some of us refer to our books as children. They are our friends, our comforts, and markers of our accomplishments. So it should probably come as no surprise that, for the most part, academics have treated digital projects much like books. Does this scenario sound familiar? A historian receives funding to build a digital project to show off their latest research project. They hire a graduate student a person who has some experience with web design. This person builds a digital project according to the parameters set out by the historian. Once the project is complete, it is launched to great fanfare. The digital project builders pat themselves on the back for a job well done, and move on to other projects.

What’s wrong with this image? Most book projects are temporary (I know, insert joke here). Eventually, there will come a point where we will step away from the manuscript and move on with our lives. But once the book is published (if you are lucky), it’s essentially finished. This is not true when it comes to digital projects. Digital projects are, by their very nature, unfinished. What’s more, over the course of their entire lifetime, some digital projects can involve just as much if not more work, research, output, experience, and so on than a book (even a scholarly one). Much of this depends upon their complexity: there is a world of difference between a blog and an online database. But our point here is that digital projects are not like books; when problems arise is when we assume that once they have launched, they are finished.

Expert Tip: It’s important to note here that despite the vast amount of work that goes into digital projects, this work is usually not considered relevant for academic hiring and promotion (which is likely one of the many reasons why digital projects are often underfunded). We need to think more seriously about digital projects in general.

So why is this a problem? Nothing is more depressing than seeing a fantastic historical digital project die a slow and painful death. Moreover, many are extremely valuable resources for both historians and members of the public. When Andrea first started teaching, Then/Hier was a godsend. She found their resources, like this list of resources for teaching Canadian history or this one of primary source collections, to be invaluable for creating in-class activities. Which is why she was devastated when the site ceased operations in 2016. While the site is still more or less operational, and their list of events is still updated, those wonderful lists are not longer really functional – now they are a collection of the ghosts of digital projects past. Click on any of the links, and you will find either dead URLs (Champlain 2004 used to be a great resource on New France), digital projects that use outdated technologies like Flash and are now almost unusable (like this digital project from Historica Canada), or digital projects where you can no longer access any of the documents (like this one on Acadian history).

Further, if you’ve applied for a SSHRC grant lately, you may have noticed that there is now a requirement for investigators to meet certain knowledge mobilization guidelines, including making their data publicly available. One might expect that over the next five to ten years, we will see an explosion of online exhibits, repositories, and collections on the subject of Canadian history. Which is fantastic. But if we’re not careful, and we don’t have plans about how to ensure that these projects are designed to last , then much of this work will be for nothing.

The Case for Digital Projects

You may be wondering at this point, why bother with digital projects at all? There are many reasons, but one of the most important is access. Digital projects are one of the best ways to make historical material (primary and secondary sources) accessible as possible to as many people as possible. This work democratizes research and knowledge in a way few other platforms have the capability to do. This is true for both free and subscription-based digital projects. Even if a digital project has a paywall or requires a subscription, paying a few hundred dollars to access it is still eminently easier to access than paying for travel, lodging, and accessing the archives on site..

Digital projects, when done well, also allow for information to be researched and examined in new ways. We won’t talk too much about this now, but there’s a series of blogs coming up in August based on a panel we presented at CHA this year on how digitization allowed for the re-examination of traditional historiographies. We don’t want to spoil it, but it’s pretty exciting!

Let’s take a look at some of the good digital projects that have been produced.

Stephanie is a big fan of the Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique (PRDH), a genealogical database produced by the Université de Montreal, which has been in operation for almost two decades now – it’s 20th birthday will be next year. It has had a profound impact on the historiography of New France, influencing several major published works, including Leslie Choquette’s Frenchmen into Peasants. That said, it is still not only perfectly functional, but an amazing tool. It is simple, easy to use, and there are still people you can interact with if you have questions, which means the project has obviously been maintained long term.

Another amazing, and very recent, digital project was the Halifax Explosion digital exhibit that allows you to experience the event itself with a 360 degree video, produced by CBC. It was a big hit with students and adults alike, and they did a lot of things right; their video content is linked to YouTube rather than their internal archive; their maps of the outcome of the explosion are simple while driving the point home; and everything is extremely easy to find. It’ll be interesting to see if this survives as a long-term tool for teachers, or collapses under the weight of its production.

One of Andrea’s favourite digital projects is “Colonial Despatches” and its associated learning website, “The Governor’s Letters: Uncovering Colonial British Columbia.” “Colonial Despatches” collects together transcripts of the incoming and outgoing correspondence of the Colonial Office through London and the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, for the years between 1846 to 1871. The transcripts are fully text-searchable, and accompanied by images of the original documents. But the real gem here, as far as teaching is concerned, is the accompanying website, “The Governor’s Letters.” Using primary sources from the Colonial Despatches site, it includes four complete lesson plans, accompanied by three guides to assessing primary sources. All of the lesson plans and guides come with downloadable PDFs and in print-friendly forms. Andrea has used the lesson on the Douglas Treaties and the Numbered Treaties countless times in first year classes to great success.

Best Practices

So what can you do to ensure that your historical digital project will have longevity? Here are a few suggestions.

Have a Plan

If you want your digital project to last, you need to have a plan in place. First and foremost, do your research and find the best web server that you can. Institutional ones are the best, but always do your research.

It’s also important to think about how many years you hope that the digital project will remain operational. Five years? Ten years?  And whatever you go with, include money for this maintenance in your budget, then hire someone to maintain the digital project. It would also be a good idea to have a plan about what you would like to do with your digital project after this period elapses. Will you archive the digital project? Integrate it into another collection? Or consider transferring your digital project to another server?

For example, Multicultural Canada is a fantastic example of a digital project that could have died, but didn’t, because its organizers thought ahead. The digital project was originally a project from the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, and contained digitized and transcribed copies of community newspapers from marginalized ethnic communities across archival collections across the country. This was a fantastic resource for anyone working on the history of ethnicity in Canada. Andrea, for example, made use of their copies of the Jewish newspapers, including Canadian Jewish News and the Jewish Western Bulletin. Unfortunately, their funding for server hosting ran out in the last couple of years, and it would have been a tragedy if all of this information had been lost. Thankfully, someone had the foresight to move the entire collection over the Simon Fraser University (SFU), which is where it now resides.  

Don’t Rely on Third-Party Organizations

Some of us think that digital projects will be preserved online indefinitely. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Go ahead, try to find your first Geocities digital project or Livejournal blog. We’ll wait. What’s that? You can’t find it? That’s because you cannot rely on third-party organizations to maintain your digital project for you. Sometimes web hosting services go out of business, like Geocities. And when they go out of business, so does your digital project. (Although the rumour is there was a project trying to archive all the Geocities projects after the fact…that sounds like fun!) These are first and foremost businesses, and when they are no longer profitable, they go out of business. Remember how Storify went out of business last year, and we collectively lost our minds? Yup, just like that. In other cases, some free or almost free web servers (like GoDaddy) have very strict regulations, and if you fail to renew your contract on time, you will lose your unique URL and all of your content. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.

What about the Internet Wayback Machine, you may be asking. Doesn’t it archive digital projects? Yes, but not in the way that you think. If you do use it, you must manually preserve every single page of your digital project. Further, the site doesn’t preserve any attached documents, so any images, film clips, or documents will be lost. So while it is better than nothing, especially for digital projects that have already died, don’t expect it to be a faithful archive of your project.

KISS

Remember how it used to be relatively easy to fix a car or a home appliance yourself? And how since they’ve become more technologically advanced with new features, it’s become all but impossible? The same principle applies to digital projects. In general, keep things simple. There are two important reasons for this. First, what seems new and cool today will look dated in about six months. Remember when Flash was all the rage? Now it just causes rage… (hahaha). Second, the more bells and whistles a digital project has, the more likely they are to break, the harder they are to fix, and the more expensive they are to maintain.

If you do want to do something fancier, there are some great platforms you can use that look fantastic and take a lot of the work out of maintenance. For example, ArcGIS’s storymap format is a great web presentation tool, and can be used for so many projects. A great example is the New Brunswick Loyalist Journeys project. The platform itself has a number of pre-determined formats that can be used and integrated with ArcGIS (sort of like how WordPress has a number of pre-coded blog formats, but this is a bit more intricate).

Avoid Changing Your URLs

A URL is basically your web address. Anyone can enter this information into their browser and make your digital project appear on their device. The problem here is that sometimes the URLs for websites get updated or changed. (DON’T DO THIS! (We’re looking at you, University of Toronto Press and the Champlain Society!) This can be a potentially significant problem, since anyone who has linked to that URL will now need to update it, otherwise it won’t work. So pick something and stick with it. It will save a lot of people a lot of work.

Use Open Formats that can be Easily Migrated

One of the best ways to ensure that your digital project remains readable even as digital technology continues to evolve is to use open formats. An open format is essential a file format that stores information in a standardized way. The classic example is the PDF. A document in PDF form will look the same no matter the program or device being used to access it. There are open formats for just about every kind of file, and Wikipedia has a great list to help you out. Ensuring that your files are in open formats means that even if you need to migrate your digital project, the files will remain readable.

We would especially recommend putting relevant information into PDF documents that are available on your website, which will allow users to save these documents to their computers. This means that the knowledge won’t be lost, even if the website is no longer available.

For databases projects, Drupal is your best bet. Stephanie has  worked with three database projects, all of them Drupal-based, and the format is easy to work with, both for database management and for users. She highly recommends it. It’s open source, and has been around since 2000, so it’s stable. Options are almost infinitely customizable, and the only real limit is how much you want to code. If you are using university institutional services (Stephanie’s locals are the Centre for Digital Scholarship at UNB and Islandora at UPEI, just for example), and are lucky enough to have the excellent tech staff that we do, you won’t have to worry about it much.

Back Your Stuff Up

We need to keep emphasizing this. Keep actual solid copies of your digital projects. Keep them on a separate, external drive, so that if your computer gets wiped out by a virus, or you spill your coffee on your laptop, you don’t lose all your files. Stephanie has multiple copies of everything that has ever been loaded to the BNALD. When it comes to digital projects, particularly projects that involve years of work, pretend you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Don’t store your material on drives that are vulnerable to things like spills, computer viruses, breaks from frequent use, or rust. Back it up, put it in a case, store it, leave it alone.

If Necessary, Archive Your Work

In recent years, librarians and archivists have devoted considerable time and energy to the problem of preserving digital projects, particularly government websites and social media. They are still in the process of developing standard guidelines for how to do this, but the Library of Congress does have some recommendations about how to optimize your digital project for preservation. You’ll notice that their recommendations are very similar to ours.

You may want to consider archiving your website yourself. Again, we are still in the process of figuring out how this works.  One good option would be to use Webrecorder. It’s like the Internet Wayback Machine, only it preserves an entire website and all associated content. This way, you can archive both your website, and any other website you want to make sure you can access in the future.

Our Favourite Digital Projects

• PRDH https://www.prdh-igd.com/fr/le-prdh
• Atlantic Loyalist Storymaps https://loyalist.lib.unb.ca/story-maps
• ArcGIS Story maps https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/
• A City Destroyed https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion/
• The Criminal Corpse: http://www.criminalcorpses.com/
• The Programming Historian https://programminghistorian.org/
• Pier 21’s History of Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/shaping-a-community-black-refugees-in-nova-scotia-0
• Nova Scotia Museum Virtual Exhibits https://museum.novascotia.ca/collections-research/virtual-exhibits
• Nova Scotia Archives Virtual Exhibits (like this one on suffrage in NS) https://novascotia.ca/archives/suffrage/
• New Brunswick Archives https://archives.gnb.ca/Archives/?culture=en-CA
• The Governor’s Letters: http://www.govlet.ca/en/cc3step1.php
• Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from North American Slavery(http://freedomonthemove.org
• Peel’s Prairie Provinces: http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/index.html
• The Canadian Letters and Images Project http://www.canadianletters.ca
• Vocabularies of Identity https://voi.lib.unb.ca/splash.php
• British North American Legislative Database https://bnald.lib.unb.ca

Chronic Offenders

• CBC Digital Archives
• Canadiana
• Library and Archives Canada
• Virtual Museum of Canada’s older Community Stories

RIP: In the Arms of the Angels

• Atlantic Canada Portal https://preserve.lib.unb.ca/wayback/20141205151334/http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca//
• The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan Online https://web.archive.org/web/20140425071328/http://www.esask.uregina.ca/
• Google News Archive with search capacity

*Thanks to Laura Larsen, Matthew Hayday, Robespierre Toupée Pol, and Catherine Ulmer for their favourite dead or dying websites!

We hope we’ve convinced you about why digital projects are so important and why it is vital that we think ahead regarding the issue of long-term viability. If you enjoyed this blog post, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Thursday for our second to last review of Back in Time for Dinner, which may or may not include pictures of baby Andrea…. See you then!

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