Traditional scholarship consisting of text, images, tables and charts can be captured and preserved in formats such as PDF or in print. Digital projects, by contrast, require active rendering by a computational device and often involve digital media such as audio and video that cannot be captured in PDF files or translated into print. In addition to being complex, the need to archive these works is also acute, as technology changes and the need for ongoing maintenance result in many projects decaying and even disappearing over time.
Archiving these projects requires attending to the multiple layers of their construction and points of computation. For most web based projects, these layers include the interface, the data, and the generating code. For most future visitors, the interface where they can engage with the completed work will be the most important element of the archive. However, for future researchers interested in reproducing or building on the work, the interface will be insufficient. For these future researchers, access to the data and to the code used to generate the results and the interface elements will be desired. All of these elements, and the systems they require to operate should also be documented in a project README file so that future users are able to understand the components and how the project might be reconstructed.
These guidelines walk through how these three layers of the digital project can be captured, with recommended tools and resources.
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