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.