Guidelines for Building an Effective Archival Storage Strategy

This tutorial provides insights on the guidelines for building an effective archival storage strategy for individuals working in the field of archaeology, cultural heritage and museum management. It is hosted by the platform iDAI.tutorials of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In addition to this, this platform offers the first Arabic translations of international standards and guidelines on digitization such as OAIS, and Dublin Core. Courses and resources are being continuously developed and added by the various initiatives of the project “Stunde Null/Hour Zero” with the support of the Archaeological Heritage Network. The platform was initially developed in the framework of the Funds-in-Trust agreement "Capacity Building, Technical and Media Support" between UNESCO and the German Archaeological Institute.

Culture Heritage Institutions worldwide are moving towards the digitization of their data and analogue archives, alongside safeguarding and facilitating their sharing for research purposes. But as this new big data is emerging, ensuring that information is protected and safeguarded becomes exponentially more difficult. The tremendous volume of the digital data means that the old manual methods of governing and archiving data are no longer feasible.

Some of the learning objectives of the tutorial are:

• Enabling organizations to put some form of archiving strategy in place while using the most cost-effective state of the art technologies
• Learning different storage archive implementations and strategies can lead to a more efficient environment
• Digitization of analogue archives
• Ensuring secured sharing of resources for research purposes