REISSUE - 7796 Creating a sectoral standard and guidance for managing digital data generated from archaeological investigations

The recent 2017 Mendoza report recommends that Historic England will work with key stakeholders to improve the long-term sustainability of archaeological archives generated by developer-funded excavations. With the huge increase in the amount of digital data being created through archaeological projects, there is now a real and pressing need for the sector to develop strategies and standards to ensure that digital data are archived and curated to ensure long term preservation, accessibility and reuse. An important step towards this goal is a defined standard for the nature and content of an archive for digital data generated from archaeological investigations, an established methodology for digital archive compilation and its integration into working practices throughout the course of a project. This project is the start of this process and will focus on the development of a sectoral standard and guidance for the creation, compilation and management of a digital archaeological archive. Making archaeological digital archives accessible and reusable for cultural, educational and scientific purposes are the fundamental drivers for developing this standard. The standard should adhere to the FAIR principles - that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (See https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples). The project will not reproduce already established sectoral standards and guidance created on digital archiving (by the Archaeological Data Service), for example on file format, naming conventions or metadata, but will need to identify and link to these when establishing the different components within an archaeological archive, when they should be used and who is responsible for them.