Diana Marsh and Katrina Fenlon (University of Maryland), "Linking Analog Archival Data Across Scientific Disciplines: What’s Next?"
Currently, data embedded in primary archival sources are largely disconnected from networked systems of discovery and access that support research and reuse. This interactive session will invite a dialog between two strands of research focused on how we can most effectively make primary sources reusable as data, to support scientific research across disciplines. The first project, “Recovering and Reusing Archival Data for Science” (Funded in part by USDA, PI Katrina Fenlon) investigates data recovery and reuse efforts focused on historical data, including data drawn from archives, legacy research materials, and other primary sources. The goal of this project is to advance our understanding of retrospective data curation—both across disciplines, and across the boundaries of practice between professional data curators and scientific researchers. The second, “Building a sustainable future for anthropology's archives: Researching primary source data lifecycles, infrastructures, and reuse ” (NSF, PI Diana Marsh) builds on Fenlon’s work by taking a deeper dive into a single discipline. It asks how anthropology’s analog primary sources—including fieldnotes, photographs, analog audiovisual materials—can become findable, reusable data sources. The project aims to: identify current movements and future best practices for anthropology’s archival information infrastructure, evaluate test collections in emergent cross-disciplinary open access platforms, develop training modules for anthropologists and archivists/data curators.We will present two short presentations interspersed with discussion questions for the group, centered around: 1) how historical archives are being used by scientists, and 2) exciting advances in archival infrastructure or practice for data reuse.
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