Sustaining MedArt: Assessing the Persistence and Longevity of a Pioneering DH Project

This study takes contemporary user analysis of historical digital objects as a central component of a responsible digital preservation strategy. The direct object of inquiry is a scholarly website, “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture” (http://www.medart.pitt.edu), created in 1995 at the very dawn of the World Wide Web. This site continues to serve a global community of scholars who investigate the art and architecture of Western Europe between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, and has become the de facto reference standard for study images for this period. Although the web presence has benefitted from some minor updates, the digital object—a time capsule, really—has remained more or less untouched for the past two decades, a period of drastic change in the surrounding digital environment. Using a usability analysis survey that examines the intellectual, aesthetic, and technical elements of this important digital humanities project, this early-stage study reveals the ways in which contemporary functional and aesthetic interactions can identify important preservation criteria that need to be addressed when designing long-term preservation strategies for digital projects that serve scholarly communities. Usability is critical to sustainability in the digital environment.