Preservation

Preserving scientific digital data and ensuring its continued access

About

Preserving scientific digital data has emerged as a major initiative for both funding agencies and academic institutions. Digital preservation, the study of the processes, organizations, and technologies needed to maintain scientific digital data over time, is a multidisciplinary field that draws on the literature from informatics/computer science, library and information science, and domain sciences such a biology, geology, and environmental sciences.

Our agenda

The Data to Insight Center, at the core of its mission, maintains a robust digital preservation research agenda that includes such topics as:

  • data management
  • data lifecycles
  • data curation
  • preservation technologies
  • metadata for ongoing access, provenance, and preservation
  • formats
  • data preservation policy development

Current projects

Current projects include Sustainable Environment-Actionable Data (SEAD).

For more information and additional projects, please see the Storage and repositories sections on Open source software.

Contact

Please contact Beth Plale or Robert McDonald for more information about projects related to provenance and metadata.