Sustainability Strategies for Digital Humanities Systems Claes Neuefeind 1 , Philip Schildkamp 2 , Brigitte Mathiak 2 , Unmil Karadkar 3 , Johannes Stigler 3 , Elisabeth Steiner 3 , Gunter Vasold 3 , Fabio Tosques 3 , Arianna Ciula 4 , Brian Maher 4 , Greg Newton 5 , Stewart Arneil 5 , Martin Holmes 5 1 Cologne Center for eHumanities, University of Cologne, Germany 2 Data Center for the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany 3 Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz, Austria 4 King’s Digital Lab, King’s College London, United Kingdom 5 Humanities Computing and Media Centre, University of Victoria, Canada Now that the Digital Humanities (DH) are becoming a well-established research field, producing seminal publications in print as well as digital formats, the time for consolidation has come. It is noteworthy that digital tools and methods from the pioneering days of the DH are degrading and some have already vanished. Therefore, it is urgent to take action and to prevent further losses. While the necessity of high quality research data management (RDM) is encouraged or even required by funding agencies and there is an increasing awareness for long-term archiving (LTA), when it comes to primary research data, the fact that the DH exhibit a structural deficit regarding maintaining and preserving research software is at the least underestimated. In this panel, we will focus on infrastructure and institutional support. Beginning with an overview of existing strategies from the DH and beyond, we highlight selected strategies to compare how they are implemented at different institutions in terms of infrastructure, expert knowledge and also funding. We also want to evaluate the extent of institutional support that is needed to successfully sustain and archive DH projects and the software they use. We will discuss currently implemented solutions to maintain and preserve research projects and software, all of which approach the outlined problem from a different angle. 1. Sustainability Strategies in DH and beyond (Brigitte Mathiak, Data Center for the Humanities, University of Cologne) Sustainability of research software is an important issue for the DH. In our investigation of the “Digital Scholarly Editions“ online catalogue, we compared the time stamps of the last seen version on the Internet Archive with the first seen version (Schildkamp & Mathiak, 2019). We discovered that of 466 digital editions, 376 had disappeared (cf. fig. 1). The average life time is 8.5 years, while the half life time is about 6 years. We expect that other DH projects exhibit similar trends. The reasons for the disappearance of these valuable research resources are manifold: diminishing funding, lack of institutional support and, over time, lack of personnel support as researchers switch career paths or research directions. The “Digital Dark Age” (Whitt, 2017) affects not only our digital cultural heritage, but also the born digital outcomes of scholarly labor.