Kathryn Stine is Senior Digital Curator the History of Art Department’s Visual Resources Center. In this guest post, she describes the VRC’s current collaboration with DH Fellow and Associate Professor or Art History, Elizabeth Honig.

Last week, we discussed project sustainability through the lens of who builds DH projects and who maintains them. Project sustainability can also be viewed as the way a project connects to adjacent tools and communities, both actively and passively. Who uses your project and how easy it is for someone to create a derivative use? How interoperable is your project —how easy it is for your project to connect to other tools and data sources?

All digital humanities projects, even ones which are relatively technically simple, are built in an ecosystem of connected, interdependent technologies. Many projects will experience downtime, or even “break” as various pieces of that software are updated, rendering old connections obsolete or incompatible. Unfortunately, funding proposals in the digital humanities are structured so as to offer limited resources for technical support after the conclusion of project development. Funds may be allocated for the cost of hosting or storage, but maintenance support for a project will be limited.