Nine Projects, One Codebase: A Static Search Engine for Digital Editions

The primary goal of the Endings Project—a collaboration between project leaders, programmers, and librarians to address long term sustainability of digital humanities resources—is to create completely static sites: websites composed of only HTML, CSS, and Javascript that have no reliance on server-side processing and thus, as we have argued elsewhere, stand the best chance in terms of archivability and usability in the long term. Now at the end of the grant cycle, the Endings Project, though successful in its conversion of its past and present projects into static sites, struggled to find a satisfactory solution for replicating the search functionationality necessary for all of our projects. Most search engines require the use of server side processing; though simple Javascript search engines, such as Lunr, do exist, they cannot feasibly handle the large document collections that comprise the standard digital edition. This presentation outlines the creation of staticSearch: an open-access codebase for creating a completely client-side search engine for static websites. A fully open source project, staticSearch enables robust search capabilities for a wide range of digital humanities projects without the need for server-side processing. Built as a collaborative project between UBC's The Winnifred Eaton Archive and eight digital edition projects housed in UVic's HCMC, staticSearch can query any collection of XHTML5 documents and offers advanced searching capabilities, like boolean searches and exact phrase matching, as well as faceted search filters based on configurable document metadata. This presentation discusses the creation of the staticSearch as a multi-project collaboration and how it can offer a robust, future-proof solution for searching across HTML document collections, as well as foster stronger connections between digital humanities resources