Building together digital archives for research in social sciences and humanities

In order to help understand the possible interplay between transmission and digitization, a pilot project for the long-term preservation of research data in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) is presented by its two coordinators. The article provides some background context on transmission in digital form of past and present research in SSH. It shows the discrepancy between the increasing role of digital information and its fragility. It presents the standard abstract model for archival information systems and the way it was instantiated in the pilot project. It ends with some reflexive remarks on the factors that are bound to act upon the future of such projects: organizational behaviours, role of data and knowledge, communities of users, institutional issues and status of collective memory in SSH.