Designing Sustainable Data Archives: Comparing Sustainability Frameworks

This theory review paper argues that in order to ensure the longevity of data, we need a better understanding of the sustainability of institutions that steward data. The paper considers what sustainability means in relation to data archives. It compares five frameworks that inform the concept of sustainability in order to develop a more complex understanding of the concept of sustainability. The resulting conceptualizations of sustainability can aid data archive stakeholders, designers and analysts in making decisions about how to develop “sustainable” data institutions.