Martina TROGNITZ
(Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, ÖAW, Vienna, Austria)
Keywords: Digital Archive, Preservation, Humanities data
Abstract:
At the Austrian Academy of Sciences a digital archive, ARCHE (A Resource Centre for the HumanitiEs), was established in 2017. It was awarded the CoreTrustSeal, a core level certification for trustworthy data repository systems, which requires to have in place a set of standards and policies.
ARCHE welcomes data from all humanities fields and accepts a wide array of types of data, such as digital texts, lexicographic resources, semantic resources, tabular data, databases, digital images, file collections like GIS, 3D or CAD, media files, and many more. Thus it is a perfect match for archaeological data.
For understandability and findability of data a bespoke metadata schema was developed, which serves as a basis for the display of the archive’s content and the search functionalities. The schema includes properties to include spatial and temporal information, with means to provide persistent identifiers like IDs from GeoNames or PeriodO, in order to enhance interoperability and machine processability. Interoperability is also enhanced by the provision of different endpoints, like e.g. a SPARQL and OAI-PMH.
An overview will be given on how data and metadata in ARCHE is presented to the user, what policies were set up, and what functionalities we plan for the future. Within the context of the workshop, we would then like to discuss which features are essential for ARCHE to satisfy the needs of archaeological research and work out any further desired features.
Relevance for the conference: The presentation will introduce a digital archive for long term preservation of data from all humanities fields, including archaeology.
Relevance for the session: Besides elaborating on the functionalities of the archive a discussion among the workshop participants aims to discern which features the archive should provide in order to satisfy the needs of archaeological research.
Innovation: ARCHE is the only archive in Austria that was awarded the CoreTrustSeal so far.
References:
• M. Trognitz, M. Durco – One Schema to Rule them All. The Inner Workings of the Digital Archive ARCHE, Mitteilungen der VÖB, Vol. 71, No. 1 (2018, in print)
• E. C. Kansa, S. Whitcher Kansa – We All Know that a 14 is a Sheep: Data Publication and Professionalism in Archaeological Communication, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies, Vol 1, No. 1 (2013), 88-97