How do we coordinate the universities’ archiving and the work to make research data accessible? This was one of the questions in focus when SND invited network members to a discussion about archival matters.
The university archives and archive staff play a fundamental part in the long-term preservation of, among other things, research data. Therefore, it is important to coordinate the support for data management and preservation that is currently being developed, in order to make sure that it is also adapted to the archiving of research data, as well as to making the data accessible. In the recent SND network meeting, Hanna Höie, Head Archivist at Malmö University, presented several ongoing projects that address this work:
Common Specifications for research data
The Swedish National Archives have a project for developing Common Specifications (CS), or Förvaltningsgemensamma specifikationer (FSG), for research data. The purpose of common specifications is to facilitate information transfer and to improve the compatibility between the various electronic operational systems that are used in public administration. A common specification describes how to structure information, describe it with metadata, and package it when it is transferred, in order to create a standardised way of transferring information between systems or to an e-archive. The goal is to apply these common specifications for research data in all of the Swedish higher learning institutes. The CS project team has representatives from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Uppsala University. They have recently sent a proposal to the Swedish National Archives and are waiting for their comments.
SUHF's recommendations for the weeding and preservation of research information
The Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF) has a team of experts in records and information management who are working on a recommendation for the weeding and preservation of research information. This recommendation will function as a support for researchers as well as archivists. Issues in weeding and preservation of information are discussed from ethical and legal perspectives, and the group are also working with questions that concern the collection, preservation, and management of research data during active research projects. They hope to have draft recommendation that can be sent to archive staff for comments at the end of spring 2020. The SUHF member institutes will then receive an amended version to consider during autumn 2020, with a decision in spring 2021, at the latest.
Swedish National Archives’ general regulations concerning research data
The Swedish National Archives’ (RA) regulations and recommendations on the weeding of documents from research in public authorities (RA-FS 1999:1) (RA-FS 1999:1) will be replaced by new regulations that are more adapted to the digital developments of recent years. At present, this work is on hold pending the recommendations from the SUHF expert group (see above). The intention is that the RA regulations shall be on a more comprehensive level, whereas the SUHF recommendations will give support in more detail on matters of weeding and preservation of various forms of research information.
The archive network meeting ended with a forward-looking workshop. The workshop discussion touched on what infrastructures require in order to function, how the archiving process has to be present right from the start in a research project, and how the needs for archival metadata can differ from the needs for metadata for making research data accessible.