Governance & sustainability

A funder backing research software needs to know two things: how decisions are made, and what survives if the money or the people move on. This page answers both.

How the project is run

• Developed in the open. All code, issues and changes are public on GitHub under the archetype-pal organisation.
• Every change is reviewed and tested. Changes reach the main branch through pull requests that pass automated tests, linting, type-checking and, on the backend, security scanning. The Contribution workflow describes the checks.
• Status is recorded honestly. The Roadmap and What works today are generated from one dated list of capabilities, checked against the code, so the two pages cannot disagree.
• Supported by research institutions. Archetype 3 is supported by the OG(H)AM project at the University of Glasgow and the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

What protects the work

The design choices that matter most for longevity are the ones that keep the scholarship independent of the software.

• Open standards for every output. Images are served with IIIF, texts are stored as TEI, and annotations are published as W3C Web Annotations. A corpus can be exported and read by other tools, or archived, without Archetype running.
• The method is documented, not just implemented. The description of script — character, allograph, component, feature, hand — follows the published DigiPal framework, so the data stays interpretable. See Palaeography on Archetype.
• Self-hosted, on modest hardware. Each institution runs its own instance and owns its data. The public instance runs on a single cloud server, from versioned container images, so a deployment can be rebuilt or rolled back to an exact known version.
• Backups by default. The production stack dumps the database nightly and keeps two weeks of dumps; image files are kept on ordinary disk, where institutional backups can reach them.
• Provenance in the data. Editorial changes carry an attributed, dated audit trail, so the record of who made each scholarly decision travels with the corpus.

Open questions

• Licence. The team is choosing which open-source licence to adopt. Until one is published in the repositories, check with the project before redistributing the code.
• Long-term maintenance. Security updates, dependency upgrades and hosting all need funded time. The Roadmap lists sustained maintenance alongside new features for that reason.

Credit

Archetype builds directly on the DigiPal framework and the earlier Archetype versions developed by King’s Digital Lab at King’s College London. See From DigiPal to Archetype.