2014-02-12

Plale, Beth; Kouper, Inna

Social-ecological research studies complex human-natural environments and the uses and sharing of ecological resources. Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel prize laureate from IU, pioneered the idea that social-ecological data can be collected and stored in a centralized database, which will capture complex relationships between various components of data and facilitate their collective collaborative use. While useful in its active stage, databases present a challenge for archival and preservation, especially if they are stored in a proprietary format and where changes are often applied retrospectively to both new and existing data. In this talk we will present an approach to archiving a social-ecological research database, the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database, and discuss challenges that we encountered as well as lessons learned. The talk aims at stimulating a discussion about preservation of complex data objects and possible solutions that can be generalized beyond one case.

Indiana University Digital Collections Services

Wednesday Noon Digital Scholarship Series

IUScholarWorks Repository

IUScholarWorks Record