The next important issue concerning sustainability, and one, I think, that is less attended to, is determining how readers use and interact with the digital texts we create. The success of both Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia in continuing to attract so many volunteer contributors is not only because they contribute so much to public knowledge, but also because they are built on unremarkable technologies that are easy to use. I can teach my undergraduate students how to edit a Wiki in just a few minutes. Creative Commons licenses, both human-readable and readily applied to works easily published on the Internet Archive, (External Link) . have been applied to more than 130 million works since CC was founded in 2001. (External Link) . I will need to know how many users of my interface are frustrated and give up because they cannot find what they are looking for / do not have the appropriate version of a plugin installed or enabled / cannot navigate a complex interface, etc. At the minimum, readers of online scholarly works should be able to:
- access texts online from any computer;
- copy, paste, and reformat text freely;
- download / print documents in their entirety (not only page by page or limited number of pages);
- move the text easily and freely from one reading device to another;
- experience pleasure in encountering the design, typography, and layout of the text;
- conduct both simple text searches and Boolean searches across multiple texts;
- make their own links between and within texts;
- annotate texts, and share their textual annotations and related images or movies easily (as, for example, Flickr, Diigo, YouTube, Twitter, etc.);
- share their adaptations of texts.
More sophisticated users will want to apply text analysis tools to digital texts, but these texts should also appeal to those who, apart from keyword searching, for the most part read them in a linear fashion or annotate them with few other demands than typical word processing. Ideally, these texts should also appeal to, and be adaptable to, Web 2.0 editing procedures—though I am certainly conservative enough to argue for means of filtering these annotations by peer review or by group (e.g., a particular genealogical society might add highly useful documentation to an edition of London, but neither require or want scholarly peer review; a scholar seeking tenure or promotion might submit a set of annotations and materials to a peer review process. These groups or review tags are easily added, and could be readily filtered from a set of results to exclude, say, “My favorite early modern zombie mashups”). Arguably, any digital text should aim to be as usable as, and more useful than, a book: to be as usable, it should not need instructions for opening, paging through, searching, or bookmarking; to be more useful, I think (to be terribly opinionated here), means scholarly texts should be available for categorization and annotation in the wild. These, at least, are my own aims, and certainly the most successful online digital projects share many of these characteristics, other than the relatively new prospects for Web 2.0 (e.g., the William Blake Archive, the Rossetti Archive, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, the Perseus Project). (External Link) , (External Link) , (External Link) , (External Link) Ideally, usability testing (especially focusing on prospective readers who are not digital scholars) would be ongoing throughout and beyond the development of any digital project, though like every other aspect of digital publishing there is little or no institutional infrastructure to support and reward such activities. Questions we need to be attending to are: how vital is highly structured TEI in these early stages of preservation and sustainability? Do we know how many readers/users make advantageous use of Boolean search techniques, full-text proximity searches, or wildcards? How many searches benefit from painstaking markup (now and years from now when eventually intelligent programs will surely recognize contextual indicators of “Paris” as place versus “Paris” of Greek mythology)? How would we make these searches more effective? (Drop-down menus are one method that has been tried, but they can unnecessarily limit the search options.) Elaborate markup and data mining offer tremendous advantages, but is this the optimal way to encourage all readers to use and participate in digital projects? Thus, three significant issues that a project such as my own should address, where the intent is to build and test a system that will engage and involve students, scholars, and the public in online research, publication, and discourse: first is scholarly credibility; second is usability; third is community.