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. This will include: o how to manage the data creation process in order to facilitate archive compilation and transfer o how to determine what must be included in a digital archive, o how to compile a digital archive for transfer to a repository, including documentation, file-naming, directory structure and formatting o defining roles and responsibilities of the personnel involved in data management and digital archive compilation during the course of a project o how it should be selected and what discard policies for digital data may be needed. 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. It is anticipated that a subsequent project will promote the standard and provide training to support its integration into working practices. Note - the first step is developing the Standard and the second is how we can implement it. We envisage this in two phases: this project to establish the standard, and a subsequent implementation phase aimed at integrating it into sectoral practice.