Digital Archiving

Introduction

Digital archiving is an instrumental approach to the qualitative social science community. Digital archiving process is considered an integral research methodological component because of the emergence of recent combination of directives, which emanates from funding organizations such as the data management and sharing plans. Considering the above statement, the digital archiving process further suggests that a scholar article relating to person’s data should offer provision of a much wide-ranging scholarly community within a stipulated region. In regards to this, the process of digital archiving guarantees that a person’s full choice of social science knowledge goes far past an individual research field location. Consequently, conflict has emerged from the qualitative social science community in the process of sharing and archiving movement (Cliggett, 2013). The paper focuses on the operational digital preservations systems specifically in science and technology. It further considers a wide range of digital related objects such as technical reports and e-journals through an analysis of digital archiving based on format types.

Discussion

Qualitative researchers in the present world need take into account several factors in their quest of answering questions that have emerged during debates on the process of archiving data. One of the basic factor includes the process of laying emphasis on the outlined ethnographic data that needs to be scrutinized for quality results. It is easy to identify several barriers or challenges that the qualitative researchers cite during the process of digital archiving and data sharing. On the other hand, there emerged other basic concerns for notions about ownership of data, general privacy and the possible challenges for interpreting the presented data. While carrying out research on digital archiving, overall protection of the participants participating in the research, confidentiality and sensitivity of the data happen to be the most commonly mentioned barriers. Contrary to this assertion, the process of depositing data in a digital archive form does not translate to unmonitored, free access by the public.

Cliggett (2013) discusses in the article that digital archiving process has developed sophisticated systems with the ability of managing preserved sensitive data and the overall role of protecting the participants. For the processes to be implemented successfully there is the need to involve all the digital repository to recognize the significance of offering protection to the study subjects, and further, employ a variety of strategies, which ensures the highest level of confidentiality (Cliggett, 2013). While dealing with the social science data, there is the need to create the highest level of attention to offer protection to all the human subjects involved by ensuring that all the digital repositories build sophisticated systems, which ensures appropriate access of data. On the other hand, researchers involved in the process of depositing data will need to work with digital archives to establish the most appropriate software tools and restrictions for a particular type of data.

As the result of software and technical developments, which promises appropriate and useful systems that manages ethics and confidentiality, thus qualitative sets of data should increasingly be set up in digital archives. The general question of ‘who owns data?’ has been constantly discussed. Cliggett (2013) states that one of the factors “influencing qualitative researchers’ claims of data ownership may be the recognition that making sense of raw qualitative data requires the depth of contextual knowledge a researcher gains from “being there”” (p. 4). Anthropologists are examples of qualitative researchers who end up joining a particular conversation regarding the process of archiving data, thus assuming the responsibility and mandate of reorganizing the entire process. Scholars have a better chance of laying out the best foundation by possibly embracing and exploring useful qualitative digital archiving.  

Techniques in Digital Archiving Process

Keeping Data for a Long Period of Time

In any given society, there is need to store data for the purpose of future use. Data should be stored in a good environment away from dangerous places. After the process of archiving digital data on any given platform, scholars or researchers need to find a way of keeping the archived data for a long period of time. Big organizations need to put up data storage systems, which aides in the process of keeping data. Storage of data is an essential aspect because it involves all the information regarding a given organization’s needs such as employee records, finances, and other relevant documents.

Paper data and hard copy forms of data have always been used by researchers and other scholars in the process of archiving digital data. There exists the risk of losing data stored in files and folders due to crushing of hard drives and other backup related systems. For this case, it is of necessity to store digital archived data in good systems to prevent the loss of data at any instance. With the development of new technology, new storage devices have been put in place to control the risk of losing data.

Privacy, Anonymizing and Confidentiality

Researchers often have a basic misconception on depositing of their raw data in any given institutional archive, thus breaching the general commitment of offering protection to the study informants. Best practices need to be initiated to curb this vice, thus ensuring privacy and confidentiality of data.

Conclusion

The digital archiving process tends to lay the foundation for a much broader research community, which aims at building knowledge among scholars. It is of great significance in gaining an overall understanding of the few steps involved in the process of archiving disciplinary data.