Introduction: Archiving
The term “archive“ (from the Latin archivum, meaning “filing cabinet“) often conjures images of dusty basement rooms filled with endless rows of shelves stacked with files. For institutions like government agencies, which require the documentation and retention of administrative processes (e.g., insurance companies, health and pension funds, registry offices), this image is certainly accurate, although digitizationDigital data are created through digitalization, which involves converting analog materials into formats suitable for electronic storage on digital media. Digital data offer the advantage of being easily and accurately duplicated, shared, and machine-processed. Read More is increasingly becoming the norm.
But in addition to administrative archives, there exists a vast variety of archives, both public and private, which serve as repositories of collective memory. These institutions – like museums, libraries, and documentation centers – often hold significant societal value. Scientific collections across various disciplines represent a specialized form of archives, which are primarily maintained for research purposes. The Wissenschaftliche Sammlungen (Scientific Collections) portal offers insights into the diversity of these collections. Of particular interest are ethnological collections housed at universities in Göttingen, Frankfurt, Mainz, Tübingen, Marburg, Hannover, and others, which include artifacts, as well as audio, visual, film, and written documentation1 see: https://portal.wissenschaftliche-sammlungen.de.
The Open Science movement’sSince the early 2000s, the Open Science movement has advocated for an open and transparent approach to science in which all stages of the scientific knowledge process are made openly accessible online. This means that not only the final results of research, such as monographs or articles, are shared publicly, but also materials that accompanied the research process, such as lab notebooks, research data, software used, and research reports. This approach aims to promote public participation in science and knowledge, engaging interested audiences. It also seeks to encourage creativity, innovation, and new collaborations, while enabling the verification of findings in terms of quality, accuracy, and authenticity – a process intended to democratize research. Components of Open Science include Open Access and Open Data, which provide the infrastructure for sharing interim research results. Read More call to make research data as accessible as possible for scientific reuseData reuse, often referred to as secondary use, involves re-examining previously collected and published research datasets with the aim of gaining new insights, potentially from a different or fresh perspective. Preparing research data for reuse requires significantly more effort in terms of anonymization, preparation, and documentation than simple archiving for storage purposes. Read More and public interest connects with a longstanding tradition of preparing and storing documents and objects for research and public information purposes. Many scientific collections grant access to their archives for interested parties and even publicly exhibit parts of their collections.
This article focuses exclusively on making digital and digitized data accessible through institutional archives or repositoriesA repository is a storage location for academic documents. In online repositories, publications are digitally stored, managed, and assigned persistent identifiers. Cataloging facilitates the search and use of publications and author information. In most cases, documents in online repositories are openly and freely accessible (Open Access). Read More2This does not necessarily mean that the material is freely accessible on the internet; access may be controlled or restricted as needed., rather than on the individual archiving practices of researchers who store their data and materials in personal digital folders or physical boxes. The ultimate aim of archiving research data is usually to enable their reuse (see article on data reuse). A crucial aspect of this process is data documentation in the form of metadata, which makes the data discoverable, comprehensible, and usable by others (see article on data documentation and metadata).