Sustaining a Presence on the Internet: Some Lessons from www.slavevoyages.org

Slavevoyages is now embarked on its third iteration, if we count the 1999 CD-ROM as the first. As such the site and the core database that preceded it has passed through not only the Digital Humanities revolution, but – given that it started life as a box of 2,313 IBM punch cards in 1969 – the computer revolution as well. This paper reviews what we have learned along the way, often very painfully, distills what appear to us to be the essential prerequisites of a successful site, and attempts to identify what will be necessary to keep a site live on the future.