Sustaining Digital Scholarship: keeping research data alive

The need to sustain data and outputs from research projects well beyond their initial grant-funded period is commonplace within academia, particularly so within the Humanities. We often find that these semi-active or warm data collections have value and require care beyond the life of the original hosting, system, or platform they were conceived upon. With the increasing demand to make data more open, and research funding bodies increasing requirements and time periods for which research data must remain available, institutions need to be ready to offer researchers the tools and platforms to comply. Compliance is one lens through which to view this particular challenge. Yet we believe that institutions should and can be motivated to sustain data by celebrating the research they develop, and through reaping the continued scholarly benefits and impact gained through research data being hosted and shared for as long as possible.

Our poster present practical insights into the methods employed at the University of Oxford to support digital humanities scholars (and others) safeguard their digital legacies. We concentrate and focus on 3 areas of ‘People’, ‘Process’ & ‘Technology’ to highlight how the Sustainable Digital Scholarship (SDS) service at Oxford is helping researchers and their projects secure the long-term future of their research data outputs.