Digitising History - Section 6.1

The right of Sean Townsend, Cressida Chappell and Oscar Struijvé to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All material supplied via the Arts and Humanities Data Service is protected by copyright, and duplication or sale of all or any part of it is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your personal research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. Permission for any other use must be obtained from the Arts and Humanities Data Service.

Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise, to any third party.


	Digitising History CHAPTER 6 : ARCHIVING AND PRESERVING DATA
	6.1 What is the History Data Service? A major theme of this guide is the importance of creating digital resources that are suitable for archiving and re-use. The History Data Service (HDS) collects high-quality digital resources - transcribed, scanned or compiled from historical source documents - which are of long-term interest to the historical community. The collection covers a wide range of historical topics, and brings together over 450 separate collections of data, including databases, spreadsheets, textbases, texts and scanned images. Data collections are accessioned for all periods, from ancient history through to 1945, and although the primary focus is on the UK, cross-national data collections are regularly accessioned. Data are accepted in a variety of formats, including delimited ASCII, ASCII texts in particular SGML marked-up texts, databases, spreadsheets and images, and on a variety of media including CD-ROMs, disks and cartridge tapes, as well as via FTP. The HDS Collections Development Policy contains further information about the scope and the nature of the collection, and Section 6.3 contains further information about preferred and acceptable data formats. The HDS preserves digital resources produced by individuals, projects and organisations, mainly within the higher education sector. It is supported in this effort by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, Humanities Research Board of the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the Wellcome Trust's History of Medicine Programme. All of these funding bodies either require or recommend that their grantholders offer for deposit with the HDS any historical digital data that they may produce. Where significant bodies of historical data are managed by other agencies, such as other data centres and data archives, the HDS negotiates data exchange and/or access agreements in preference to direct acquisition. Data are deposited with the HDS with a non-exclusive licence for use in research and teaching. This means that intellectual property rights and copyright are retained by the copyright holder(s) and that the depositor grants the HDS the necessary permissions to preserve and disseminate the data for research and teaching.
	© Sean Townsend, Cressida Chappell, Oscar Struijvé 1999 The right of Sean Townsend, Cressida Chappell and Oscar Struijvé to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All material supplied via the Arts and Humanities Data Service is protected by copyright, and duplication or sale of all or any part of it is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your personal research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. Permission for any other use must be obtained from the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise, to any third party.