My Orkney Story project explored the sustainability of digital storytelling platforms, as a key challenge in these projects. This issue is particularly prevalent for projects that involve time-limited funds that are established to create and curate platforms but provide limited longer-term resources. 

The challenges include emergence of new information and new digital design features, and the need to keep the digital record up-to-date; maintenance of the digital platform infrastructure (web domain and hosting), human resources, legal and copyright issues and sustainability of project ownership and responsibility. 

To overcome the challenges, it is advised to consider the following resources, before embarking on the project, to ensure sustainability of its digital platform: 

• Financial resources (including technical maintenance costs, hosting, human resources, promotion),
• Human resources (including time for maintenance and development, a point of contact),
• Technical resources (including URLs, expertise and knowledge to update),
• Marketing resources (to promote and engage audiences with the platform),
• Community resources (including wider ‘buy in’ from the community, permissions to use, preserve and potentially transfer stories).

Many opportunities were also identified, making the investment in overcoming the challenges worthwhile and important. These include engagement with education, commercialisation and enterprise, knowledge exchange and collaboration. Digital resources will enable these and wider opportunities to a greater extent than physical archives. 

Explore the My Orkney Story project on its website, where the project report is also available.