On the Successful Migration of Research Data

Abstract

More than five years ago, we crafted a detailed scenario for migrating our research data from our locally-maintained, departmental repository to an external, institutional repository for which we had only little control over. Now, with the rising cost of updating and maintaining our repository software to the latest version, personnel fluctuation, and the opportunity to use data services of a newly founded Digital Humanities Center, we decided to put into practise the scenario step by step. This paper describes the actual challenges we encountered in the migration process, the deviations from the original scenario and the compromises we needed to make, and finally, how we succeeded to get all data transferred in a safe and information-preserving manner.