Digitizing, Archiving...and then? Ideas about the Usability of a Digital Archive

Digitizing is everywhere. Archives and libraries bring their holdings into the digital world. New sources are created exclusively digitally. The archive is and will become digital. The process of digitization has been going on for more than twenty years and has increased considerably since the appearance of the first smartphone. It is now possible to be online, read and generate digital content around the clock. And the amount of data is enormous. At the Data and Service Center for Humanities, we are confronted with this amount of data in the research field, and we try to bring the different data models and different media types into a uniform but flexible system. The difficulty is not the data storage anymore but the presentation and usage of the data. The aim is not to archive data, but to keep them alive. Availability and usability are playing an important role. Right now, we are two front-end developers building our infrastructure web applications and think about new possibilities to bring the data to the users.