The Back End: Infrastructure Design for Scholarly Research

The design and creation of digital repositories depend upon a combination of technical and intellectual labor, but the relation between these is rarely acknowledged. This article takes the Blue Mountain Project as a specific case study for examining the ways in which models of scholarship and design decisions are connected. In particular, it calls attention to features of infrastructure that are integral to the workflow of production and that also have implications for use: digitization standards, metadata creation, interface design, and other components. Each of these has implications for cost, sustainability, and use.