Archival, Repository and Related Studies

Archival, repository and related studies investigate the methods, infrastructures and policies that underlie the long-term stewardship of cultural, scientific and administrative records. Central concerns include the formulation of digital preservation frameworks—encompassing policy development, metadata management and trust models—to ensure enduring access and integrity of born-digital and digitised materials. Institutional repositories have emerged as focal points for curating research outputs, often built on open-source platforms that support ingest, discovery and governance workflows. Web archiving techniques address the capture and fixity of dynamic online resources, while large-scale and thematic crawls feed multidisciplinary analyses in digital humanities. Methodological advances span Handwritten Text Recognition for large-scale transcription, environmental scans to expose biases in digitised press collections and counter-archiving strategies that reassemble marginalised voices within born-digital corpora. Across public, academic and community contexts, studies emphasise interoperability, audit certification and collaborative curation, shaping evolving models of trust, access and social memory in a networked era.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent work has investigated counter-archiving techniques to reconstruct and enrich large born-digital collections. Six novel strategies exploit both the algorithmic affordances and materiality of digital records to reassemble marginalised and non-canonical entities within vast repositories. By treating archives as malleable assemblages rather than fixed containers, these methods enable intensive viewpoints on evidence otherwise discarded or hidden and support iterative reconfiguration of collections in response to new research and political questions.

Archival, Repository and Related Studies publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in archival, repository and related studies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Digital preservation policy: A formal framework defining strategies, roles and procedures for maintaining digital content over time.

Institutional repository: A managed digital platform for collecting, preserving and disseminating an organisation’s scholarly outputs.

Trustworthy digital repository (TDR): A repository certified against recognised criteria to demonstrate reliability, integrity and sustainability.

Migration: The process of transferring digital objects to new formats or systems to prevent obsolescence.

Counter-archiving: Strategic reassembly and augmentation of digital archives to surface marginalised, non-canonical materials.

References

1. Digital preservation systems and technologies in South African academic libraries. South African Journal of Information Management (2021).
2. The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya. Insights the UKSG journal (2022).
3. The TRUST Principles for digital repositories. Scientific Data (2020).
4. Hashes are not suitable to verify fixity of the public archived web. PLOS ONE (2023).
5. Web archives as a data resource for digital scholars. International Journal of Digital Humanities (2019).
6. Understanding the application of handwritten text recognition technology in heritage contexts: a systematic review of Transkribus in published research. Archival Science (2022).
7. Bias and representativeness in digitized newspaper collections: Introducing the environmental scan. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2022).
8. Reassembling digital archives—strategies for counter-archiving. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024).