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Archives and Records Management for Data Curation

Central to the enterprise of archiving and records management is the idea of a "record" - defined as "data or information fixed on some medium which has content, context, and structure" (AAA, 2014). The archival definition of a record is very close to how we think about data playing an evidential role within scholarly communities. In future sessions we will talk about the context and structure of digital data in curation, but is this session we will focus on how the three concepts (content, context, and structures) from archives and records management are applied to data curation.

We will cover two additional themes from archival science:

  1. Provenance, and the "chain of custody"
  2. The "records continuum" and the "data continuum"

As we apply these concepts to the domain of research data curation, it is helpful to draw upon the work of Cliff Lynch who has descried the difficult role that a scholarly record will face in a digitally networked environment. Issues of reliability, authenticity, and continued meaningful access are complicated by the distributed nature of digital artifacts, including data (1994). Archives and records management have thoughtfully approached these topics for many decades, and so being able to draw upon the knowledge, and the tools developed by this community will be useful in your own institutional data curation initiatives.

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