IJDC | General Article From Passive to Active, From Generic to Focussed: How Can an Institutional Data Archive Remain Relevant in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape? Maria J. Cruz Jasmin Böhmer TU Delft Library TU Delft Library Egbert Gramsbergen Marta Teperek TU Delft Library TU Delft Library Madeleine de Smaele Alastair Dunning TU Delft Library TU Delft Library Abstract Founded in 2008 as an initiative of the libraries of three of the four technical universities in the Netherlands, the 4TU.Centre for Research Data (4TU.Research Data) has provided a fully operational, cross-institutional, long-term archive since 2010, storing data from all subjects in applied sciences and engineering. Presently, over 90% of the data in the archive is geoscientific data coded in netCDF (Network Common Data Form) – a data format and data model that, although generic, is mostly used in climate, ocean and atmospheric sciences. In this practice paper, we explore the question of how 4TU.Research Data can stay relevant and forward-looking in a rapidly evolving research data management landscape. In particular, we describe the motivation behind this question and how we propose to address it. Received 05 February 2018 ~ Accepted 05 February 2018 Correspondence should be addressed to Maria Cruz, University Library, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email:
[email protected] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 13th International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors.