Menu

Home / Events / Our Digital Future - Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Long Term Data Preservation and Access / Twenty years of digital curation at the Archaeology Data Service: challenges for archive and access

Twenty years of digital curation at the Archaeology Data Service: challenges for archive and access

Back to: 
Our Digital Future - Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Long Term Data Preservation and Access

Tim Evans, Department of Archaeology, University of York

Founded in 1996, the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is a discipline-specific digital archive. After twenty years, the organisation curates over 320,000 digital objects comprising over 2 million files and amounting to 10Tb of data. As the amount of data held continues to increase, so do the challenges of ensuring preservation, management and access. The paper presents practical case-studies from the ADS, focussing on our procedures for ensuring data integrity, and the result of a recent migration of vector images. The paper also examines accessibility and re-use, as well as the practical challenges of presenting large datasets.