Preservation of Scholarly Work Policy and Guidelines
Bryn Mawr College Library and Information Technology Services (LITS) is dedicated to supporting and advising students, faculty, and staff on their research, publishing, and digital scholarship and other scholarly projects. An important part of this work is advising and consulting on the long-term preservation of scholarly work, an issue that has gained urgency in the digital realm.
There is a common misconception that once something is on the Internet, it will be accessible forever. Technology evolves rapidly, and this means that file formats, hardware, and software can quickly become obsolete. Websites that are not maintained, updated, and backed up may disappear or become unusable.
The College community should be mindful of how, and whether, to preserve their scholarship beyond any immediate needs. LITS provides consultation on the conception and management of digital scholarship projects, as well as training on digital preservation through personal digital archiving workshops provided to the College community.
LITS does not systematically preserve scholarly work produced by the College, with a few exceptions. The institutional repository, Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College, is an open-access repository for research and scholarship produced by students, faculty, and staff. Ph.D. dissertations will be preserved in the institutional repository. Versions of articles published by faculty and staff are also deposited in the institutional repository; however, Bryn Mawr College does not attempt to preserve permanently all faculty and staff publications because there are strong existing national and international structures in place that ensure that print and digital academic publications are maintained for the long-term.
Digital scholarship presents new challenges for preservation. Whereas printed books can sit on a library shelf for decades at little cost, digital scholarship projects require regular maintenance, including periodic migrations to new file formats, software, and hardware. Because of the high costs associated with digital preservation, Bryn Mawr College will not systematically preserve digital scholarship projects and websites produced at the College. If you are hosting a digital scholarship project or website on a brynmawr.edu domain, including Domain of One’s Own and blogs.brynmawr.edu, you should take proper measures to ensure that your content remains accessible to you for the length of time required, including updating your software, backing up your files, and migrating your content to a new domain when you leave the College.
LITS staff provide consultations to help conceptualize digital projects as well as to think through the lifecycle of digital projects and their associated preservation challenges.