In this presentation, I will review lessons learned about taking a publishing approach to digital scholarship after 10 years with a particularly popular platform and how we plan to move forward. I will also revisit tiered service models for library technology from the LIS literature based on our experiences and emerging trends in the field. For the past decade, as a result of perceived need and based on research on digital publishing needs in the humanities, our library publishing service has used Scalar as one of a small number of platforms we support. Chosen due to its support for multimodal writing, it has been our most popular long-form platform for research publications, including particularly for our Black Studies series, but it has posed challenges due to its aging tech stack and a gap with accessibility expectations that will soon have additional legal force. In spring of 2025, the centrally hosted version of Scalar suffered significant technical challenges, blocking all use for several months. While our local instance was not affected, we paused acceptance of new proposals using Scalar and gave a deadline to existing works in progress for final publication, moving towards an exclusively maintenance and preservation mode for our instance. Our experiences with Scalar raise considerations for successful digital scholarship web publications and related services, and this presentation will explore successes, pain points, and opportunities for moving forward after sunsetting a platform.
