[INDOLOGY] Projects, websites, universities

[Dominik Wujastyk]

The recent scare about the Nepal-German descriptive cataloguing data has
yet again shown that universities are unreliable hosts for the preservation
of digital resources.  Long-term members of this forum might remember when
U. Washington shockingly unplugged Blackbox
<https://blackbox.hacc.washington.edu/>, a major repository of Indological
texts, fonts, and software in the 1990s, maintained by Tom Ridgeway. The
Indology website and archive of etexts used to live on a machine at UCL,
but it was closed after I left  that university, without consulting or
warning me.  The University of Cambridge refused to continue hosting John
Smith's Bombay website when he retired.  The Indology website has been able
to take over <https://bombay.indology.info/> the hosting of that incredibly
valuable asset (think: Pabuji, fonts, software,, Mahābhārata, Rāmāyana) .
There are many more examples of websites and archives being just shut down
when faculty members move, or a couple of years after project funding ends.

I don't have a great answer to any of this.  But I do think that the
persistence of digital assets is a vital question for us all and something
we should all think about carefully if we put valued resources on the
internet.

For example, the results of my last funded project are accessible through
http://sushrutaproject.org.  I have tried to push as much important stuff
as I can tot Github and Zenodo (and http://archive-it.org).  But as soon as
I stop paying personally for the registration and hosting at
sushrutaproject.org that gateway website will close down within a few
weeks.  Do I really want to keep paying, out of my pocket, for the rest of
my life?

For the new project that I announced yesterday, I've built the website at
Github.  This costs nothing, so the worry about annual payments is gone.
And as far as I can tell from reading the Github documentation, they do not
delete project repositories, even if they become inactive.  If repositories
are "archived" they simply become read-only (docs
<https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/archiving-repositories>).
Github seems very enlightened about long-term preservation.  They save
offline archives at the bottom of a mineshaft in Svalbard - I kid you not.
There are many good features for project work at Github, and it's all
free.  Building a simple one-page website is also extremely quick and
easy.  Building something more complicated, with menus etc., is more
troublesome.  It's significantly harder than using Wordpress (the Microsoft
Word of website creation).  But the up-side is that you get a website that
will persist for years and doesn't require payment.

Within the university world, departments and computing centres are not
going to look after project data and websites in the long term.  The one
institution that actually does think long-term is the university library.
But as far as I can tell, most university libraries are still working out
what their place is in the digital landscape.


Best,
Dominik


--
Dominik Wujastyk, Professor Emeritus, Classical Indian History
University of Alberta

"The University of Alberta is committed to the pursuit of truth,
the advancement of learning, and the dissemination of knowledge
through teaching, research and other scholarly and creative activities and
service."
-- Collective Agreement
<https://www.ualberta.ca/human-resources-health-safety-environment/media-library/my-employment/agreements/2020-2024-collective-agreement---working-version.pdf>
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