From Tamagotchis to Pet Rocks: On Learning to Love Simplicity through the Endings Principles

This article, by two of the technical leads on Project Endings, represents the culmination of all we have learned over the last few years, during which we have rescued over a dozen projects from death by software obsolescence and reconstituted them as entirely static, standalone websites with minimal dependencies. We now know a great deal, mostly from our own mistakes, about how not to build robust, long-lasting digital resources, and we have developed a set of principles, practices, and software tools which we believe provide solid defences against digital extinction. Below, we describe the institutional context within which Project Endings was born, and lay out methodically the guiding principles by which we now develop digital editions and other web resources.