The following table provides general suggestions for suitable archiving options for long-term preservation and for working copies of reserach data. For more specific recommendations, please contact ses.admin@sydney.edu.au.

Archiving eNotebooks

For practical guidance on how to archive data from an eNotebook, please see the resource sheet on Archiving completed eNotebooks.

Organising your files well helps to ensure that they remain findable and understandable for you and for other users. Using meaningful file names and a strategically organised folder structure throughout your project are useful techniques for organising data and other digital content to ensure that it will be easy to archive at the end of a project. If your files don’t have meaningful files names and aren’t well organised, you should do this before archiving anything.

File naming

Select an appropriate naming convention for your files as early as possible and follow it consistently throughout your research. Make sure your naming convention is documented, for instance, in a README file, before archiving your content.

• You may wish to start your title with the date, formatted as YYYYMMDD, to display your files in chronological order
• Choose useful keywords that you or others might use to search for your files, separating each word or section with a hyphen or underscore. Document the keywords you choose to use, so that you can interpret your file names later. Useful keywords may include:
  
  • project acronym
  • location
  • data type
  • data collection methods
  
  Example: [Date]_[Project]_[Location]_[Method]_[Run]

Things to avoid

• Don’t manually change or delete the file extension suffix (e.g. .docx, .pdf, .csv) which is usually generated automatically
• Avoid the use of special characters such as \ / : * ? " < > |, apart from hyphens and underscores, in file names
• Don’t make file names too long

Folder structure

A well organised folder structure can save you time and will help other future users to understand and find your digital content.

Key considerations:

• Keep any raw data in a separate folder from working data
• Store any consent forms separately for ethics and privacy reasons
• Nest your folders in the direction that best suits to how you plan to use them, e.g. Location > Method > Date or Method > Date > Location
• Don’t create too many empty folders ahead of time

Example: [Project] > [Experiment] > [Instrument or Type of file] > [Location]

Further information:

• Guidance on organising digital content, UK Data Service
• Naming conventions, University of Edinburgh
• Project TIER protocol for guidance on developing a folder structure

Before archiving digital content, it’s essential to ensure that your content is accurately documented and described. This will ensure that you and any future users can make sense of it and understand the processes that have been followed in the creation of the content, for example, during data collection, processing and analysis. If you are archiving to a location that allows for access by or sharing with other users, then well-described content will be more easily discoverable and reusable by others.

Metadata

Metadata is descriptive and contextual information about your content. It may include title, creator(s), date produced/ collected, location, abstract, subject, method, process, quality, format, rights, and ownership.

To determine what metadata to keep, it’s useful to think about what information would help someone else understand and reuse your digital content. You may consider using a metadata standard (also called a metadata schema), a defined set of fields that can either be general or discipline-specific. Using a standard will not only provide a rich description of your content, but also increases the likelihood of people finding it.

If you’re not sure where to start, check out Dublin Core, which is a commonly used general metadata standard, or find a metadata standard related to your discipline by searching the Digital Curation Centre’s disciplinary metadata directory.

Creating documentation

Once you’ve decided what metadata you need to collect and keep, you should record this information and store it with the digital content. Some storage systems, like the University’s eNotebook, provide mechanisms for you to do this when you save your content. In other storage systems, like the Research Data Store and CloudStor, you may have to record your metadata manually in a README document (a text document) or a version control table.

Further information:

• ANDS metadata page, Australian National Data Service
• DataONE best practice guide for metadata
• Guide to writing “readme” style metadata, Cornell University

When preserving and publishing digital content it’s essential that you save your work in an appropriate file format to ensure long-term accessibility. The file formats you use when working with your data may not be appropriate for archiving or publishing purposes. You should think about capturing data or converting files into formats that are:

• widely used within your discipline
• publicly documented, i.e. the complete file specification is publicly available
• open and non-proprietary
• endorsed by standards agencies such as the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO)
• self-documenting, i.e. the file itself can include useful metadata
• unencrypted
• uncompressed or that use lossless compression

For example:

• Quantitative research data
  • While you collect and analyse your data, you might need it in a number of different formats: an Excel spreadsheet, a database, an SPSS, SAS, R, MATLAB or other file format native to the specific data analysis software you are using.
  • Once your analysis is complete, save the data as a comma separated values (.csv) file for long-term storage. Most data software packages provide options for saving as a comma separated values file. This format is portable across different computing and software platforms and is therefore more resilient to software updates.
• Image files
  • The uncompressed TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a good choice for long-term preservation of image files. Most image creation software packages provide options for saving images as TIFF files. You should save your image files in this format right from the outset, so that you capture the highest possible quality master image files.
  • While working with your images, you may need to manipulate, share, or embed them in other documents. For these purposes it may be useful to compress your image files into JPEG format so that they’re smaller and easier to send over the internet or embed in analysis project files.

The following table provides general suggestions for suitable file format choices for long-term preservation of digital conent. For more specific recommendations, please contact library.digitalcollections@sydney.edu.au. We can provide advice on which file formats to use for long-term preservation, for sharing with collaborators and for access copies of your content, as well as when and how to convert to these formats.

Further information

• Preferred forms for depositing data with Australian Data Archive
• National Archives of Australia’s preservation file formats
• Mendeley Data: File Formats
• UK Data Archive’s file formats table
• Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement 2018-2019
• National Archives of America Tables of File Formats
• Sydney Conservatorium of Music Research Data Management Provisions 2015 (see Schedule 4: Preferred file formats for audio visual and other data)

Some digital content will have a legally mandated retention period, which is the minimum amount of time that you need to keep the content after its creation or the completion of a project. Content must be kept for at least the minimum retention period.

Retention periods for digital content, such as research data or business records, will vary depending on the content and the context in which it was created. Retention periods are specified in:

• GA47 Education: Higher education and further education records from the State Archives & Records Authority NSW
• University Recordkeeping Policy
• Research Code of Conduct, 2013
• your faculty's Research Data Management Provisions

For information on retention periods for research data and the proper destruction of research data, please see the Data retention periods page on the University intranet.