Digital Narratives in Flux: Navigating Preservation Challenges for Classic ESRI Story Maps

For the past decade, Esri's story maps platform has offered a way to combine maps, text, images, and other multimedia, facilitating the creation of engaging narratives with minimal technical barriers. The challenge of preserving work in this format looms large, however, as the retirement date for the "classic" version of the platform approaches. The presentation describes an effort undertaken at the University of Minnesota to contact authors for hundreds of public-facing story maps. It reflects on the difficulty of managing scholarly outputs in a system not primarily designed for that purpose and of representing web-based work within the library record.