The ADA approach: retro-archiving data in an academic environment

This article concentrates on the retro-archiving of older digital research data. The ADA approach was developed and used to retro-archive older data files, most of which were between 10 and 30 years old. The origin and main characteristics of the ADA approach are described in the second section of the article. The third section discusses two recent data-archiving pilot projects that were conducted in the Netherlands. The first of these projects, the ADA project, laid the foundation for the ADA approach, which was subsequently applied and tested again in the second project, eDNA, which focused on archaeological data. The final section of the article provides a comparison of the results of these two projects.