Who uses the digital data archive? An exploratory study of DANS

Surprisingly little is known about the uses and users of digital data archives, about relationships between users and the staff of data archives, or how these behaviors vary by discipline, geographic region, policy, and other factors. Digital data archives are not a single type of institution - they vary widely in organizational structure, mission, collection, funding, and relationships to their users and other stakeholders.

We present an exploratory study of EASY, the Electronic Self-Archiving SYstem, a digital archive hosted at DANS. DANS was founded in 2005 as an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Scienc- es (KNAW) and of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). DANS is responsible for archiving 50 years of digital research data in the social sciences and humanities. We present a number of visual explorations with the goal of identifying methods for studying the contributors, consumers, and role of archivists in digital data archives. In particular we address RESEARCH about users; CURATION of digital content, and interfaces for NAVIGATION.

This is the poster related to the entry in the ASIS&T Proceedings 2025. 

Borgman, C. L., Van de Sompel, H., Scharnhorst, A., van den Berg, H., & Treloar, A. (2015). Who uses the digital data archive? An exploratory study of DANS. In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–4). http://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010096