The “Communities sustaining digital scholarship” project is a study of how communities understand and affect the sustainability of community-based digital humanities projects and digital archives. Through a case study of four digital humanities projects, we sought to answer the question: How do the communities surrounding each project understand, affect, and implement the sustainability of their community-centered digital collections? What it means to be sustainable within a community requires (a) more precision about what sustainability means in different contexts, for different communities; and (b) what the relationship between communities and sustainability actually is. Through interviews with teams and communities surrounding each project, triangulated with evidence from participant-observation of each project and relevant documentation, we sought to understand how communities define sustainability for themselves, and the implications for community-based strategies for sustaining their efforts. This white paper reports on the initial outcomes of this research effort. The main contribution of this white paper is a framework of factors that affect the community-centered sustainability of digital scholarship.

This research is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.