Heidelberg Research Architecture OpenDACHS

OpenDACHS continues and significantly enhances DACHS, the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies. DACHS was a reaction to the notion of the extremely ephemeral and volatile character of resources on the Web. Resources may be changed, moved to different locations, or even disappear completely. The issue of vanishing web-content is even more pressing in the context of social and political discourse in China. Initiated by the late Professor Wagner, DACHS began collecting “endangered websites” already in 2002, saving them for future research. OpenDACHS expands this approach in creating a citation repository for all CATS researchers. It establishes workflows to generate a sustainable archive of cited online sources. The project is a collaboration between the Digital Library of the Institute of Chinese Studies (DiBOA) and the Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA), funded by the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies and the Centre of East Asian Studies.

Access to the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS)

A first output of the project was the poster “OpenDACHS - A Citation Repository for the Sustainable Archiving of Cited Online Sources” which we presented at the E-Science Days 2019.  

OpenDACHS comprises services and workflows for researchers which allow the archiving of cited resources, generation of DOI identifiers which can be used in research publications, and creation of library catalog records for each cited resource. 

OpenDACHS makes use of the .warc format, published as ISO standard 28500:2017. As webcrawler the open source software Heritrix is used, which was published by the Internet Archive. The individual archived records can be viewed with tools like the Wayback Machine.