0.15 A response to the responses of john unsworth and john rink on  (Page 6/7)

As for whether academic societies should shoulder the burden of peer review, I believe that ultimately they should. Peer review is one of the primary activities of academic societies and it is their service to their discipline and their colleagues. I also believe that different kinds of communities can provide various kinds of peer review, but ultimately they are dependent upon structures of authority and dialog. As long as those are in place, then peer review might come from a variety of places. I do not mean to imply that I think peer review is necessary for everything. The EVIA Project will eventually be putting up material that has not been peer reviewed. This material will be designated differently and the user will simply have to rely on his or her own judgment.

John Rink in his response raises related concerns but focuses more directly on funding and sustainability. To address John’s questions about funding very directly, we believe that it is possible to sustain the project without the level of funding we had during the extended development of the project. Sustainability includes many areas, not just funding, and I will address each of them in sequence.

Preservation of media objects is a basic activity of the project and we are achieving preservation by adhering to best practices in video preservation as well as we can, given the lack of international standards. The objects themselves are stored in a Fedora repository with preservation masters in Indiana University’s Mass Data Storage System. The files are maintained as part of the Archives of Traditional Music and the Digital Library Program. All EVIA Project files are incorporated into the Indiana University library infrastructure for long-term support of digital objects.

We are well aware that our current interface for accessing the video content will likely change in the future and there is a risk that in a worst-case scenario we will not have the funds or the partnerships to keep up with changing web technologies. However, we are doing everything we can to insure that the video segments created by the project remain as accessible as possible for as long as possible. We achieve this by our relationship with the library and a commitment from the Digital Library Project to maintain access. We create Persistent URLs for each video segment so that the access video copies can continue to be located despite changes in servers or even in hosting institutions.

Software development has been the most expensive aspect of the project and like many projects, the basics of keeping the technology running, let alone new feature development, requires regular investments. We are addressing the software development needs through additional grant funding that typically combines content expansion with software development to address basic maintenance and the addition of new features. In the long term, we hope to see video and video tools as part of the Indiana University technology infrastructure, and we are working to realize a larger university effort in this regard.