Preservation of Scientific Data in the Humanities

René van Horik

Issues covered in the presentation:

• Scientific data archives in the Humanities and Social Sciences:
  • Social science data archives. (Survey based. Archiving methods developed in the 1970s).
  • Electronic text archives. (Importance of TEI for describing content, context and structure of electronic texts).
  • Historical data archives (both structured and unstructured data. Archiving routines based on social science data archives).
    • Source oriented computing vs. problem oriented computing and its impact on data archiving methods.
    • Importance of relation dataset – historical source
  • Public record offices. (Relative recent interest in digital archiving, definition issues, legal context, adoption of principle of provenance in digital environment).
• International situation:
  • Social Science and Historical data archives in Europe (Organisation and situation in a number of countries)
  • International collaboration
    • IFDO (International Federation of Data Organizations)
    • CESSDA Council of European Social Science Data Archives)
  • User oriented organisations
    • AHC: Association for History and Computing.
    • ACH/ALLC: Association for Computers and the Humanities / Association for literary and linguistic computing.
• Important standards:
  • OAIS (helps to establish common vocabulary)
  • DDI (Data Documentation Initiative)
  • XML based standards, e.g. METS
• Changing research practice and influence on data archiving
  • Scholars working together in networked environment ("Collaboratories" / "Sharium")
  • Data archives must be active at the beginning of the data life cycle
  • Central vs. distributed models for storage
  • Open Access