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, 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 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). 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