Celebrating Twenty Years Of DANS Data Repositories
Creators: name: Touber, Jetze
name: Braukmann, Ricarda
name: Hof, Cees
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Curation infrastructure: Tools, systems and services that are in development
Curation infrastructure: Movements in Open and Citizen Science and trust in digital curation
Sustainability and strategy: Work on curation processes, techniques, costs, and workflows
Working with challenging data: Sensitive data, retrieval and secure curation
Data archiving
Data publishing
Data discovery
Data dissemination
Data reuse
IDCC25

description: Looking back, the coming-of-age of IDCC over the past twenty years coincided with the genesis and development of DANS, the Dutch national centre of expertise and repository for research data. In that period the services which DANS offers to curate, archive and publish research data have matured, improving their sustainability and usability, in parallel with IDCC’s maturing of their advice and support regarding the storage, management, protection and sharing of digital research data.

DANS started out with EASY, a generic repository for research data, making use of custom-built software. This repository had a strong focus on archaeology, quantitative humanities and social sciences. As EASY’s user base expanded, accommodating for instance life sciences data and qualitative data for the humanities, its functionalities and internal dependencies became increasingly sophisticated. Maintaining the system while continuing to implement innovations became increasingly more challenging.

In response, DANS embarked on a transition which transformed its repository services. DANS’s positive experience with DataverseNL, a technical service in which research performing organisations can participate to develop their own data repositories, built on the open source, community maintained Dataverse software, was instrumental in this. DANS migrated all its data to a new system built on Dataverse software. In the process, DANS expanded its services, creating an ecosystem of domain-specific Data Stations for publishing and disseminating research data in four domains, all connected to a core component for Long Term Preservation (the Vault). Each of the DANS Data Stations can link to their own customized tools for data ingestion and curation, creating a federated network of services catering to disciplinary needs. These technical services, moreover, are embedded in training, documentation, policy, and community building efforts managed by domain experts.

Looking forward, we foresee more web services for advanced data curation to be latched onto our ecosystem of Data Stations. The strings tying together the components for metadata storage, data search and data deposit will be further loosened, allowing for customized search interfaces and discipline-specific deposit pipelines to be integrated with the Data Stations. Data curation will be supported by decentralised metadata schemes and pre-processing services for data enrichment and FAIRification of data. AI-enhanced curation services will drive innovation and scalability. Moving away from the monolithic repository system which stood at the cradle of DANS, we look forward to a federated future of co-owned repository services, including our Data Stations as well as the repositories participating in DataverseNL, reaching across the spectrum of academic and applied research.

This poster will visualise the evolution which DANS’s research data repository services have gone through, as well as the development we see ahead of us.