This document discusses guidelines for making archaeological data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). It is funded by the European Commission and aims to support the creation and sharing of FAIR archaeological data. The document introduces the FAIR data principles, which are designed to make data more easily discoverable and usable. It also discusses the role of metadata, identifiers, standards, and repositories in making archaeological data FAIR. Guidelines are provided around each letter of FAIR to help researchers and institutions implement good research data management practices.

1. Europeana Archaeology is funded by the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom programme
Towards data FAIRness
Hella Hollander DANS-KNAW

2. OBJECTIVES:
• Support the creation of FAIR data in the archaeological
sector
• Define and spread guidelines to good practices in
archaeological data management
• Adapt standard quality criteria for datasets and data to
the archaeological case, and support their
implementation among users

3. Introduction to FAIR principles
Minimal set of community agreed guiding principles to make
data more easily findable, accessible, appropriately integrated
and re-usable, and adequately citable.

4. Introduction to FAIR principles
Findable Easy to find by both humans and computer
systems
Accessible Stored for long term such that they can be easily
accessed and/or downloaded with well-defined
license and access conditions
Interoperable Ready to be combined with other datasets by
humans as well as computer systems;
Reusable Ready to be used for future research

5. FAIR data in a trusted repository
• FAIR principles for data quality
• CTS criteria for quality of TDR
• A perfect couple for quality assessment of research data and
trustworthy data repositories
• Ideally: a CTS certified archive will contain FAIR data

6. FORCE11
https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples

7. Everybody loves FAIR!
Everybody wants to be FAIR… But what does that mean?
How to put the principles into practice?

8. PARTHENOS GUIDELINES to
FAIRify YOUR DATA MANAGEMENT
https://www.parthenos-project.eu/portal/policies_guidelines
https://zenodo.org/record/3368858#.X4A1Iy8RqqR

9. Work done in Parthenos
• Interviews with humanities researchers, including
archaeologists within the Parthenos project and
external between 2016-2018
• Survey
• Literature review

10. Aim and Users
• 20 guidelines structured around the letters of FAIR
• Users are both data producers/researchers who need clear
and simple guidelines on how to start with Research Data
Management (RDM) + Research Institutions and Data Archives
• This is thought as a first entry point for good RDM practices
• The guidelines are online available via the Parthenos Training
Suite
• It was thought for humanities researchers but can be used
broadly

11. Invest in people and infrastructure

12. • Focus is on Metadata Schema
and Identifiers. Humanists
work with a variety of sources
(from archives, museums, or
surveys) and each of them
requires a specific metadata
standard.
• The message here is: make use
of the right fields to describe
the right research object
• Identifiers also play an
essential role for the
humanities: they need to be as
unique and persistent as
possible
FINDABLE

13. • Focus is on where the
researcher’s data are stored
(trustworthy), how they can be
retrieved (protocols), and
stating if and how much they
are accessible.
• The message here is: your
research data can be as
standardized as possible, but if
they can’t be preserved and
accessed, then it is not of
much use…
ACCESSIBLE

14. • Focus is on making the
researcher’s data able to
dialogue with other
(researchers’) data
• The message here is: use of
standards, vocabularies/
ontologies, APIs, support the
researchers who want to
connect their data with other
data – this creates new value in
the research process itself, it
enriches data making them
alive
INTEROPERABLE

15. • Focus is on being able to
integrate other researchers’
data into your own research
• The message here is: not
only data, but also their
documentation and reuse
licences are important!
Humanities data are all
about interpretation, but
aim to the higher data
integrity
REUSABLE

16. Dataverse
to support
data storage
during research
EASY
Certified Long-
term Archive
DANS key services
https://dans.knaw.nl

17. Europeana

18. Example in Europeana of NO Re-use

19. DANS: Open Access registered users

20. Can I use this? Yes, with conditions

21. THANK YOU!
Contact: hella.hollander@dans.knaw.nl
www.dans.knaw.nl
These training materials were developed in collaboration with the Europeana Archaeology
project and with funding by the European Commission under the
Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom Programme