Publications

After several years of reliance on foundation support, Oxford University’s Electronic Enlightenment (EE), a database containing the digitized correspondence of over 6,000 thinkers and writers from the long 18th century, needed to transition from a grant funded project to an independently sustainable research project. After hiring a business planning consultant to help them think through different options, project leadership concluded that a sustainability model based on institutional subscriptions to the resource was the best fit for the project’s needs. In…

For many museums and cultural institutions, the digital environment provides an exciting opportunity to expand access to their collections and enhance their brand. At the same time, the high costs of creating and maintaining digital collections lead some organizations to think about ways to generate revenue from these assets. V&A Images, a department of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s commercial trading company, licenses photographs of objects in the museum's collection for commercial, educational and personal use. The unit is tasked…

The University of Southampton’s Hartley Library has been engaged in a number of large scale, grant funded digitization initiatives focused on heritage materials such as parliamentary papers and British pamphlets. These projects left them with a challenge familiar to many grant-funded projects: developing a strategy to preserve access to the content after the grant period concluded. Early experiences suggested to library leadership that they were not well positioned to host this content locally, so with subsequent projects they began to…

The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King’s College London, an academic department focused on the advancement of the digital humanities, engages in a wide variety of research projects that often lead to the creation of electronic scholarly outputs. Using a model that is rare among humanities departments, CCH supplements government and institutional funding for research and teaching with a remarkable number of outside research grants and with revenue generated through knowledge transfer activities that leverage the department’s…

This research is part of a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. In 2008, we selected twelve projects to examine, analyzing the steps their project leaders have taken to achieve sustainability, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation. "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today" serves as a guide to the cases, outlining the stages that successful projects undertake in developing sustainability…

The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works that are accessible to end users directly, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work. The decentralized distribution of these new model works can make it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number, even for university librarians tasked with knowing about valuable resources across the disciplines. In the spring of 2008,…

In a series of projects, we were asked by JSTOR to examine scholarly communication practices in various disciplines. The goals of this work were to understand how research is conducted and disseminated in select disciplines, and to identify the importance of different scholarly resources. In this project, we focused on the field of education.