Thursday, April 10, 2003

Department of History: Projects "The Netherlands Historical Data Archive (NHDA) preserves and gives access to a heterogeneous collection of historical data created by historians for various research projects. For preservation and management purposes all data is converted into ASCII, even though the original formats might have been more user-friendly. Interested researchers can download the ASCII files directly from the website of NIWI-KNAW, together with accompanying variable lists/codebooks. They have to convert the ASCII files to workable formats themselves. This project aims to improve the services of the NHDA to the research community. It will explore the possibility of using XML and OAI for better access to the NHDA collection, but also to research data kept elsewhere, at other institutions. Thus, a virtual archive environment, "collaboratory", will be created that gives easy access to different data collections at different locations, and that will improve the exchange of data and information among researchers. The collaboratory will include data from the Erasmus University and Utrecht University, as well as data from the NHDA collection. The long-term preservation of research data is also a key issue of this project. The project will develop a new protocol for managing and preserving the collections of the NHDA, based on XML as a strategy for the digital preservation. " 1:08:46 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jon Phipps. Last update: 7/10/2003; 5:33:50 PM.