What Do We Mean by "Digital Curation?"

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Archaeology is all about information. Increasingly this information is derived from data that exists in digital formats. Archaeological investigations both create and utilize substantial amounts of digital data. Just as the physical objects recovered from archaeological field studies require proper curation, digital data generated by investigations need to be cared for so they can be accessed and re-studied in the future. The curation of digital archaeological data involves interrelated activities that may occur at different scales, e.g., for individual projects, for a single organization, or in a broadly-utilized repository. The overall goals of digital curation are to maintain, preserve, and add to the value of digital data (e.g., Lord, et al. 2004; ADS and Digital Antiquity 2013, 2016). The presentations in this session will address one or more of these goals by describing organizations that provide overall digital curation services and projects that are compiling, publishing, and using digital data in various ways that add to the value of the digital data and related information.

References

Lord, Philip, Alison McDonald, Liz Lyon and David Giaretta. "From Data Deluge to Data Curation," Paper presented at the eScience All Hands Meeting, Nottingham, UK, September 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/150.pdf, accessed 1 April 2016.

ADS and Digital Antiquity. Caring for Digital Data in Archaeology: A Guide to Good Practice. 2013. Archaeology Data Service and the Center for Digital Antiquity, Oxbow Books, Oxford and Oakville, California.

ADS and Digital Antiquity. Guides to Good Practice in Digital Archiving for Archaeology. A series of webpages by the Archaeology Data Service and the Center for Digital Antiquity containing detailed guidance about creating, managing, and treating digital files in archaeology at: http://guides.archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/. Accessed 23 February 2016.