On behalf of the project team (Principal Investigator Michael Keller, Alix Keener, Henry Lowood, Jessica Riskin, and Sarah Sussman), I am delighted to announce that our Stanford Libraries’ project "Sustaining early disciplinary websites of lasting importance: The case of history of science" has been awarded a $100,000 two-year research and development grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. Our project will officially start on March 1, 2024.
Scholars of the history of science and technology produced some of the first digital projects that demonstrated how websites could be used as repositories of information and documentation to support research, yet unfortunately, most are no longer maintained or accessible.
This project will run an interlinked set of studies covering:
- User preferences for accessible and sustainable historical digital scholarly collections.
- Potential technical solutions recommended by library developers who regularly work with scholarly data
- UX testing of wireframes or prototypes based on the received recommendations.
We have selected three websites of widely recognized importance in the field of history of science, all of which are currently either inaccessible or becoming unusable (including the Athanasius Kircher at Stanford collection). Outcomes will consist of preliminary guidelines for preserving and providing access to the content of early scholarly websites.
In the meantime, we thank our colleagues for their support and look forward to reporting our findings.