Archiving data

Archiving is a general term for the range of practices and decisions that support the long-term preservation, use, and accessibility of content with enduring value. It is not a one-time action, but is instead a process and an investment that connects directly to your projects’ goals.

Should you archive your data?

You may want to archive your information if it has enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Preserving information has the potential to support the protection of rights, to seek redress, and to support reconciliation or recovery in damaged societies.

Planning for your data to be archived

Try to identify as early as possible that you want archive, what you want to archive and where you want to archive. When you are at the closing stage, it may be overwhelming to solve all arising problems, while having limited time before you need to move on.

Ideally you will identify the metadata that you need about the information you are collecting so that you don’t need to collect too much and you don’t collect too little.

Try to store data to be archived in popular (=interoperable) formats which are likely to be used in future (for example, they are used by popular software). Over the course of a few years formats may go out of use and software systems become unable to use the data.

Keep in mind that videos can be very large, so you need to make sure that you have the infrastructure or support in place to accommodate this data (see potential archive partners below).

Where do you archive?

If you archive data yourself, you will need to consider the cost, time and skills that will be required to maintain the archival system. This is not for the faint of data-heart! See (and learn intimately) the section A home for healthy data and include data storage capacity into your long-term organisational strategy.

Alternatively, it might be useful to partner directly with an archive that will help you in the public interest, such as:

• The Open Society Archives

• Duke University Human Rights Archive

• Human Rights Web Archive at Columbia University

• University of Texas Libraries’ Human Rights Documentation Initiative

• Archivists without Borders

Further resources

• Archivists’ Guide to Archiving Video (WITNESS) and a video on this topic

• New Tactics online discussion on archiving for human rights advocacy, justice and memory

Additional resources

Organizations to reach out to for urgent support

HIVOS Digital Defenders Emergency Response and Grants

If you are a human rights defender, journalist, blogger, activist, NGO or media organisation and you need immediate help to mitigate a digital emergency, check in with Digital Defenders. If you think something is wrong with your computer, phone or accounts (email, social media, website or other) please get in contact with them. See also: Digital First Aid Kit

freeDimensional

Distress Services are intended for activists and culture workers in situations of distress as a result of their professional work.

Frontline Defenders

Front Line seeks to provide 24 hour support to human rights defenders at immediate risk. If there is a crisis you can contact Front Line at any hour on the emergency hotline.

Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights

Urgent Action Fund supports women activists who are being threatened because of their work defending human rights. The Evacuation Grant is a specific type of Rapid Response Grant, designed for those in urgent need of relocation funding because of threats, persecution and/or an extreme security situation.

Online Directory of Urgent Responses for WHRDs

This Online Directory was produced by the Association for Women in Development and the WHRD International Coalition in 2011. It outlines the diverse urgent responses for human rights defenders that exist and, where available, those that are specific to WHRDs.

Project Design Resources

• Privacy Impact Assessments Handbook (Information Commissioner’s Office (UK))

• Security in a Box

• Me and my shadow (Tactical Technology Collective)

• Dialing Down Risks: Mobile Privacy and Information Security in Global Development Projects (New America Foundation)

• On-going study into digital security for aid agencies (European Inter-agency Security Forum)

• Online and Physical Security Training (Save the Children)

Data Management Resources

• De-identification Maturity Model (Privacy Analytics)

• Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

• The Frontline SMS Users’ Guide to Data Integrity

• For a listing of secure tools, see Prism Break

• On choosing a hosting provider

• On setting up a secure hosting provider

• Tactical Tech’s Security in a Box chapter on protecting physical assets

• OECD Privacy Principles

• Anonymisation: managing data protection risk code of practice (Information Commissioner’s Office UK)

Getting Data Resources

• Conducting safe, effective and ethical Interviews with survivors of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (WITNESS)

• Draft Principles for Resilience and Big Data (Bellagio/PopTech Fellows) The following is a draft “Code of Conduct” that seeks to provide guidance on best practices for resilience building projects that leverage Big Data and Advanced Computing

• Code of Ethics for the Proper Use of Social Data (Big Boulder Initiative). An effort to begin to define a set of ethical values and practices for the treatment of social data, and to educate the industry about ethical social data collection, processing and utilization practices.

• Big data: Philanthropy or privacy invasion? by Ayee Macaraig

• Open Data & Privacy Discussion Notes (Open Data Research Network)

• Open Data Impacts Research Blog (Tim Davies)

• Big Data and Privacy (NYU School of Law) reducing predictive harm

• Guidelines on use of video for documentation, including human rights abuses (Video 4 Change)

• Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research

• Internews - SpeakSafe: Media Workers’ Tool for Safer Online and Mobile Practices

Understanding Data Resources

• A gentle introduction to cleaning data (School of Data)

• A gentle introduction to exploring and understanding your data (School of Data)

• Data Quality: Do you trust your data? an article Hjusein Tjurkmen, Mariyana Hristova, Musala Soft

• Open Refine offers powerful ways to combine, compare and reconcile your data._

• The Storyful Blog and Case Studies provide a constant stream of up-to-date information on the ever-challenging video verification process

• Verification Handbook is authored by leading journalists from the BBC, Storyful, ABC, Digital First Media and other verification experts. Created for journalists and human rights defenders as it provides the tools, techniques and step-by-step guidelines for how to deal with user-generated content (UGC) during emergencies.

• Truth in the Age of Social Media (The Nieman Lab report)

• Citizen Evidence Lab tools for speedy checks on YouTube videos as well as for more advanced assessment

• Authenticating Open Source Video (WITNESS)

• Data Integrity User Guide (FrontlineSMS): The guide is intended to help users to understand, analyze, and address the vulnerabilities, risks and threats that can affect the integrity of the information communicated through the FrontlineSMS platform.

Sharing Data Resources

• A Qualitative Risk Assessment Framework for Sharing Computer Network Data (Scott E. Coull RedJack Erin Kenneally)

• Handbook on Statistical Disclosure Control (CNEX project)

• Heuristics for de-identifying health data (Khaled el emam Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute)

• Choosing an Open Source Licence for code

• Content Licencing

Existing Data Policies and Guidelines

• InterAction Protection Working Group: Data Collection in Humanitarian Response: A Guide for Incorporating Protection

• Post about forthcoming OCHA report on Humanitarianism in the age of Cyber Warfare - Towards the Principled and Secure Use of Information in Humanitarian Emergencies (April 2014)

• Guidance for Establishing Affected Persons Information Center (Viktoria Lovrics and Andrej Verity (UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA))

• International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Professional standards for protection work carried out by humanitarian and human rights actors in armed conflict and other situations of violence

• 2013 OECD Privacy Guidelines

• Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies (CIO Council): This guidelines document is written for the US government and yet its description of the benefits and risks of using social media and networking sites are in part appropriate to the needs and risks of NGOs

• Applying Ethical Principles to Information and Communication Technology Research: A Companion to the Department of Homeland Security Menlo Report

• NYU School of Law - Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms

• Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA)

• ICRC Professional Standards for Protection Work: These standards are addressed to all humanitarian and human rights actors engaged in protection work in favour of communities and persons at risk in armed conflict and other situations of violence. Chapter 6 page 37 is on ‘Managing sensitive protection information’

• IOM Data Protection Manual: The manual is comprised of three parts: the first part outlines the IOM data protection principles as informed by relevant international standards; the second part includes comprehensive guidelines on each principle, consideration boxes and practical examples; and the third part provides generic templates and checklists to ensure that data protection is taken into account when collecting and processing personal data

• Ethical Framework for Researchers Using and Collecting Data on the M-Lab Platform for Mobile Connectivity Measurements (Oxford Internet Institute)

• Donor code of conduct

• UN data collection

• Professional standards for protection work carried out by humanitarian and human rights actors in armed conflict and other situations of violence

• UNFPA guidelines on data issues in Humanitarian Crisis situations

• Protection International – Security Manual Updating