In 2018, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the AAI / Open Context an Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grant. Much of our focus during the first year of the multi-year grant has been on the question of sustainability for a resource like Open Context.
What does sustainability look like for an open access data provider?
Sustainability is a complex challenge especially because the term itself has multiple meanings. Because Open Context archives open data with other repositories (California Digital Library, Zenodo) and because it uses persistent identifier services like EZID, it already has some elements of “sustainability” in place, thanks to the preservation infrastructure provided by a wider network of institutions. The data published by Open Context will be maintained in these other systems managed by other institutions even without Open Context.
However, sustainability needs go beyond the preservation of digital bits of information that we’ve already published. The data we have already published will be more meaningful and useful to wider communities if we can continue to add to it and improve and enrich the ways that we and others can contextualize this information. That requires a sustainability strategy that considers needs beyond the preservation of bits, but also sustains ongoing work in expanding and improving our data publishing services and expanding and improving how the data we publish gets used by wider communities.
An important aspect of our sustainability work explores options and models to finance our data publishing and curation services. We are receiving guidance from a group of individuals representing libraries, museums, and publishers, who have committed to being part of our Sustainability Advisory Board for the next several years. Over the past year, phone interviews with the members of the Sustainability Advisory Board highlighted models such as The Carpentries and Open Library of Humanities that leverage networks of people and institutions for services and sustainability. Interviews also underlined the important role that an independent non-profit plays in this space, where it can serve global communities and not just a single particular academic institution.
While Open Context itself is an OER, building materials and demonstrating techniques that make sense of the growing amount of data, both in Open Context and scattered across the Web, promises to be an exciting new direction. As we say, data are for discovery and inspiration, not just management. Why archive data if nobody knows how to use it? The real value is in the reuse, and this is where improving data literacy is critical to the future of scholarship. We will post occasional reports about our continuing work with the Sustainability Advisory Board exploring these ideas and weighing various options for sustaining open data, so please stay tuned!