2026/07/05 by Sandi Caldrone · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Digital and Traditional Archives Management #Research Data Management Practices
paper · doi:10.7191/jeslib.1354
openalex publication_date 2026/07/05 · openalex created_date 2026/07/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/19
Data collection, especially on paper, started well before the digital age, and there are a few of us in the Data Curation Network (DCN) who continue to have one foot in the analog world. These records could be handwritten, typed, printed, or some combination thereof. Historical data, also sometimes referred to as heritage or legacy data, is an overlapping category that also includes digital data at risk of loss due to its age. Analog data can provide rare glimpses into the past that propel science forward — think weather records from old ship’s logs that provide data for climate models, or dusty field notebooks that show how decades of agriculture slowly impacted soil fertility — but this kind of data presents complex challenges for curation and reuse.