Library Publishing Forum 2021

Scholars are making extensive use of new digital technologies to express their research. Publishers, in turn, are working to support increasingly complex publications that are not easily represented in print. Examples include publications with embedded visualizations, multimedia, data, complex interactive features, maps, annotations, or that depend on third-party platforms or APIs, such as YouTube or Google Maps. These publications present formidable challenges for long-term preservation.

To study this challenge, a group of digital preservation institutions, libraries, and university presses worked together on an Andrew W. Mellon funded project led by New York University Libraries. With a focus on open access ebooks, the goals of the project were to:

examine a variety of works to identify which enhanced features can be preserved at scale using tools currently available
combine the findings with the knowledge and research of experts in preservation, publishing, and copyright to produce a set of guidelines and best practices. The guidelines aim to provide advice to publishers and authors for creating ebooks that are more likely to be preservable, or at least ensure that the implications of adding certain features are clear so that alternative paths can be taken when possible.
The first phase of the project focused on EPUB3 ebooks that include a variety of multimedia and supplementary material. The second phase looked at a number of web-based publisher platforms that support enhanced features such as annotations, embedded multimedia and visualizations, and other supplemental material. The final phase featured much more complex dynamic works that depend on large datasets or whose platform and presentation are an integral feature of the work.

The presentation will showcase some examples of these works and discuss the corresponding guidelines and best practices for improving their preservability.