docEng
docEng Preservation Notebook
| docEng | preservation | index.html 0.0.0 2023-08-17 |
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Work in Progress |  |
Depending on the purpose for a Document Engineering activity, an important element is how materials will be preserved and even memorialized in the face of future contingencies.
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What arrangements are made to endure changes in technology and participation of contributors?
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What provisions protect against loss of the authored materials and their presentation in the face of altered relationships and breakdowns in services and products?
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What allows for repurposing of materials and transformation to new purposes and development regimes?
There is no magic bullet to ensure successful answers to these questions. However, there is enough material in the orbit of the docEng project to provide case studies and practical demonstrations.
The fundamental requirement for a preservable document-engineering result is anticipation and practical commitment. There needs to be consistency and avenues to recovery/transposition of created works for their endurance and even active continuation. In the absence of attention to preservation, document-engineering projects will be subject to short-attention-span theatre and accompanying bit rot.
The use of GitHub and GitHub Pages is an opportunity for preservation, considering the expected longevity of Git and of the immense GitHub operation. How one obtains a preservable web presence to authoring/documentation projects is a matter to be addressed in the context of docEng on GitHub.
It is also the case that GitHub and GitHub Pages are being used for preservation of materials originally created elsewhere and that are amenable to preservation/forking/continuation here. That is already happening in the nfoTools and Miser Project efforts using GitHub project repositories.
Preservation Catalog
Everything is work-in-progress at this stage of docEng development in the open.
More to Come. Real-soon-now.
Discussion about docEng is welcome at the Discussion section. Improvements and removal of defects in this particular documentation can be reported and addressed in the Issues section. There are also relevant projects from time to time.