We are pleased to share the findings of Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Scholarship, a two-year project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by NYU Libraries to evaluate preservation for new forms of scholarly publishing. The project was a collaboration among digital preservation services, libraries, and university presses, who studied complex dynamic publications with features such as multimedia, data visualizations, and maps. The analysis resulted in a set of guidelines and best practices for creating digital publications that are more likely to be preservable. These guidelines are meant to be shared with publishers, authors, editors, digital production staff, software developers, and those who design and maintain publishing platforms.

You can now find an interactive web version of the Guidelines for Preserving New Forms of Scholarship, and a full static, print-ready version.

A report describing the methods and context for the project is now also available.

In a follow-on project we will embed preservation experts into a variety of publisher workflows to implement and test the guidelines to see if they are successful in improving preservability. As part of this process we would appreciate any feedback on the guidelines as we iterate, test, and improve on them. To contact the team, please email preservingnewforms@nyu.edu.