Connecting the scientific data infrastructure of Natural History Collections with State Archives for long term preservation: An example from Germany

The preservation of structured content of database applications outside of the running relational in-house systems is challenging. Nevertheless it is regarded as pre-requisite to ensure long term accessibility and preservation of structure and content following national laws as well as the requirements and concepts of the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) reference model for a dynamic, expandable archive information system (ISO standard 14721:2025). The involved partner organisations are the Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB) with their collection management system Diversity Workbench (DWB; www.diversityworkbench.net) and the Bavarian State Archives (GDA) with their digital archive, both acting under the same legislation and connected by service tasks. The cooperation was initiated by the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and established by its consortium NFDI4Biodiversity with the GFBio Data Center SNSB. The SNSB will realise a complete export of the database content (bio- and geodiversity data directly related to their historic collection objects) without loss of semantic content and relations. On the part of GDA an integration of the digital objects in the sustainable infrastructure of Bavarian Main State Archive with FAIR solutions for reuse is mandatory. The project presents a solution based on SIARD (= Software Independent Archival of Relational Databases) format and SIARD software suite. SIARD is creating information packages (SIPs) that conform to the ISO standards Unicode, XML and SQL:2008, as well as URI internet standard and ZIP industry standard (Markus et al. 2024:8). The solution might be appropriate as a blueprint to realise cooperative national infrastructures for preservation of archival worthy digital objects. The established access portals of the state archives in Germany will protect sensitive archived data (protected by personal rights, environmental laws, etc.) and eventually make them available for historical research under restricted access rights. The approach for preservation supplements the open data publication pipelines of the SNSB. The presentation was given at the ‘Living Data 2025’ conference.