Cite this as: Evans, T., Hollander, H., Jakobsson, U. Gilissen, V. and Wright, H. 2024 Understanding current practice through case studies from established repositories, Internet Archaeology 67. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.67.3
The article describes and compares key policies and workflows from three long standing digital repositories for archaeological data: Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) of the Netherlands, the Swedish National Data Service (SND), and the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) from the United Kingdom. The workflows examined are representative of operational workflows around data assessment and data removal that are common to all data repositories, as well as specific strategies for dealing with Microsoft Access databases, a commonly deposited file format used by archaeologists for assessment and analysis.
The article presents each workflow as a succinct case study with an emphasis on why the decisions have been made to follow a certain method. This is followed by a discussion on similarities and differences in approach and implementation in order to bring together core recommendations that can be used by others who are currently building or scoping the development of new digital repositories in the archaeological sector. Links are also provided to copies of the detailed workflows and policies deposited within the Community Owned Digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR), a finding aid for helping find tools to deal with practical data management issues.
Corresponding author: Tim Evans
tim.evans@york.ac.uk
Archaeology Data Service
Hella Hollander
Data Archiving and Networked Services of the Netherlands
Ulf Jakobsson
Swedish National Data Service
Valentijn Gilissen
Data Archiving and Networked Services of the Netherlands
Holly Wright
Archaeology Data Service
Figure 1: Status flow chart for publishing a new data description in DORIS (SND)
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