Sustaining Data Archives over Time: Lessons from the Organizational Studies Literature

This article will explore how organizational theoretic approaches to understanding institutional sustainability could be applied to contemporary data archives and archival practices, with the aim of raising larger questions about data sustainability. The article is part of a larger study in progress of how one particular example of long-lived archives, Social Science Data Archives (SSDAs), have maintained themselves over time. SSDAs predate both computers and the Internet and provide a unique opportunity to examine perceptions about what makes an archive sustainable, through the ups and downs of funding cycles and massive changes in technical and organizational infrastructure.