I am looking for models and best practices to ensure long term sustainability of a collaborative DH project. Could you please point me to long running DH projects whose protocols for governance, editorial oversight, institutional ownership/hosting I might emulate? I am thinking of medium sized DH projects as models, so bigger than one scholar publishing a digital project, but smaller than the TEI consortium or Jstor. Something the size of Nines or another project that has multiple contributors and a focused but regular scholarly user base.
Given the concerns over sustainability inherent in DH, I am also interested in thoughts and advice on how to transition a project from the stage where a grant-funded PI is the leader in getting content online to where an editorial board (and institutional hosts) maintain a project longer term. Also, how do DH projects handle the preservation of content for such a project? The data will be licensed open source, but who should hold the copyright after the project is launched? A university library, an s-corporation independent of any institution (like some non-profit scholarly journals or professional societies), the public domain, the original scholarly contributors?
Please provide links to governance structures and legal arrangement of existing projects if you are aware of them.
