Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View Projects Today. Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability

摘要

The past decade has witnessed a rush to create digital content in the not-for-profit sector, as organizations from a wide range of communities from cultural heritage, to health care, to education and scholarship have come to embrace the internet as a means to publish, collect, distribute and preserve the fruits of their work. The range of projects now living on the web is breathtaking from a site housing one scholars passion for crop yields in medieval England to massive government-sponsored national archives but the business models that will enable long-term access and preservation are still unclear. Despite the great value of the work being entrusted to a digital format and the substantial investments that foundations, universities and government funders have made basic issues of continued cultivation and long-term accessibility of the content have yet to be assured for many of these projects. The for-profit sector provides a cautionary tale for those looking to sustain not-for-profit digital resources. If the bursting of the dot-com bubble can be shrugged off as a necessary market correction, the shifts we are witnessing in 2009 are more troubling, as the emergence of the web-based economy has started to undermine more well-established businesses, such as the newspaper industry. Revenue models that worked for decades in print have not made an easy transition to the internet, and the commercial world is scrambling to develop new business plans to support existing operations. The not-for-profit community must similarly realize that old models dependence on foundation support and institutional largesse are unlikely to be reliable over the long term.