Designing and Carrying Out Digital Curation for Data Management, Research, and Data Sharing

This record describes a session at the 2018 Arizona Historic Preservation Conference that provided short presentations and a discussion on the curation of digital archaeological data and current practices to carry it out. The PPT slides by McManamon introduce the topic and the panelists. Doelle used a set of PPT slides, also provided here, to illustrate examples of the past use of large amounts of digital data to examine ancient coalescent communities and other Southwest social networks.

Archaeology and historic preservation investigations and programs generate substantial amounts of digital data and information in digital formats. To take full advantage of these materials, they need to be curated actively and professionally. Like curation of physical objects and records, the curation of digital material requires that they be discoverable, accessible, usable, and preserved. This session includes summaries and examples of how digital curation is accomplished and digital data utilized by representatives of public organizations, private firms, and academics. Presenters described how their digital data are designed and organized for activities related to: resource management, public outreach, and research.

Topics that presenters were encouraged to address included:

1. When data are generated by one of your organization’s projects or for resources that your organization manages, how is it curated?
2. Does your organization have a centralized server and data base into which the new data are incorporated?
3. Are the data from each project curated separately, if so are project data on separate media (e.g., CDs, external hard drives, other) or are they on a common server, but distinct data of other projects?
4. Are the data curated in a way that they are accessible to others inside or outside of your organization?
5. Are data handled differently, for example, site inventory data, images, data sets of particular artifact types or other recovered remains, documents and other texts.
6. If an individual is seeking data like what your organization has, how can they find your data?  Do they have to go to your website or can they discover the existence of the data via a simple web search?
7. If individuals find that the data exists, how can they access it?  Is there an extra review and approval protocol before data seekers can access the data?
8. If individuals can access the data, how is information about the data (i.e., the metadata) made available to the other users?
9. How are data collected and curated by your organization preserved for long term access and use?
10. Has your organization “migrated” any data from formats that were used a decade or more ago to new formats to make them more easily usable at present?