Long-term preservation and dissemination of humanities research data
ARCHE: A Resource Centre for the HumanitiEs
In the rapidly evolving landscape of the digital humanities, long-term archival preservation and dissemination of research data have become important components for ensuring the continuity and impact of scholarly work. Preservation of research data is particularly important in humanities research, where the data often represents unique cultural artefacts, historical records, or literary works that would be irreplaceable if lost.
Preserving digital data
Digital data is inherently fragile; it can easily be lost or damaged due to technological obsolescence, software incompatibility, hardware failure, or inadequate data management. As many prominent funding agencies now require a data management plan as part of the grant process, the onus is placed on researchers to decide how to handle data during its creation, and where to store data after a research project has concluded.
The significance of digital archiving and data management, however, extends beyond mere data storage, encompassing the broader goals of cultural heritage preservation and reuse of the data by making them accessible for research validation, gaining new insights, and developing new methodologies, education, and promotion of cultural heritage.
ARCHE (A Resource Centre for the HumanitiEs)
The digital archive hosted by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) ensures the longevity of digital records by adopting preservation standards and practices such as the use of stable file formats, regular data back-ups, and migration to new storage media.
As advocates of Open Science, ARCHE also aims to maintain the integrity and usability of the data in the future. This involves paying special attention to data structure and file naming, as well as providing context to the data in the form of descriptive metadata. The metadata scheme used to describe the collections preserved in ARCHE is based on a few well-established standards such as DataCite, Dublin Core, and guidelines offered by CLARIN.
While ARCHE primarily serves the ÖAW research community, it is open to preserving all data generated by projects within the humanities.
Data archiving and sharing
Another essential component of data archiving is the dissemination of the archived data. As a trustworthy (Core Trust Seal certified) repository, ARCHE is committed to FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and its mission is to publish the works under open licences and make them accessible in accordance with the data provider as much as it is legally permissible.
Towards this end, ARCHE shares all its collections’ metadata with the European research data aggregator OpenAIRE. ARCHE also works with discipline-specific aggregators to give visibility to collections of interest to specific academic communities. The Academy’s linguistics collections are harvested by CLARIN VLO, archaeological projects can be found in the ARIADNE Portal, and more recently, collections representing cultural heritage are harvested by Kulturpool (and Europeana).
Data for the humanities
ARCHE is also focused on improving the experience of searching, browsing, and using data on the ARCHE platform. A new Graphical User Interface (GUI) based on extensive user research was deployed in autumn 2024. ARCHE has also implemented a suite of dissemination services that allow users to view data and metadata in specific formats without the need to download the file and view them in external viewers or applications.
The robust API provides partners and data contributors the opportunity to utilize data stored in ARCHE in other websites created for specific projects. The hope is that by making our data more easily and programmatically searchable and browsable, ARCHE can better support research within the ÖAW and the larger humanities scholarly community in general.