The Building History sector launched an initiative in late 2023 with the aim of preserving and making building archaeological reports and datasets accessible online, following the example of Dutch Archaeology. To this end, a project was set up together with DANS, funded by E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science). After a workshop on depositing data in the Data Station Archaeology with DANS’ Data Processing Team Leader, several members of the Union of Dutch Building Historians, with input from DANS, prepared a comprehensive manual: “Step by Step through DANS”. The manual serves for the clear and standardised description of datasets and the submission of this dataset to DANS.
As of September 2024, the manual is in use and the sector has started filing reports. Just one month later, more than 500 building archaeological reports have already been published, especially from the BBA organisation. This collection can be found here.
The project runs until March 1, 2025. Besides the delivery of large numbers of sustainably available publications, this first project is also being used as an exploration to identify wishes and needs around standardising terminology and vocabulary within the field. Together with DANS, the sector wants to investigate whether this can be worked out in more detail in a follow-up project.
The manual ‘Step by Step by DANS’ is available on the website Bouwhistorici.nl.
