Abstract
This chapter discusses the historic challenges in developing sustainable digital humanities (DH) projects, including the high financial cost of project maintenance and the opportunity cost that results from librarians investing in learning systems instead of learning transferable technical skills. A solution is proposed in the form of librarians applying a minimal, static web-based approach to creating digital scholarship project websites, which by nature of being static have the benefit of being high-performing and secure while using minimal bandwidth, energy, and server space. This approach prioritizes an investment in the social infrastructure of DH projects, which increases librarians' control over their sites' development, deployment, and preservation and creates opportunities for the communities that benefit from these projects (students, instructors, community members, etc.) to collaborate on a project's digital framework as well as its content in a more inclusive way. Three case studies of static web DH projects conducted in the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning at the University of Idaho are discussed in depth in the second half of the chapter to demonstrate the sustainable social and technical benefits that result from a static web-based approach to digital scholarship in libraries.