Contemporary Architecture Open Research Data

The Groupe ACM (Gr-ACM) is a research group responsible for the collection of architecture heritage archives known as the Archives de la construction moderne (ACM). Digital contents in architecture heritage archives is increasing and will increase in the future both through donations of new born-digital archives and digitization campaigns of paper archives. Through the CA ORD Project, the Gr-ACM aims to improve its capacity to preserve and make FAIRly available data and metadata from digital architecture archives (both born-digital and digitized from paper). To date, the Gr-ACM has collected 4 Tb of digital data made of files in different formats (.dwg, .dxf, .pln, .jpg, .pdf, etc.) stored on external hard drives and CD-Rs, which are therefore unavailable for research.
The CA ORD Project aims to fill this gap. It is about installing, configuring, and running the open-source software Archivematica, which is an archiving system based on a multi-services architecture, that allows for automation, extraction, and normalization of data and metadata. These (METS files) will be made available on the already existing ACM’s ORD AtoM-based portal Morphé, since Archivematica and Atom are interoperable.
Thanks to readily exploitable data, the CA ORD Project will enlarge the ACM users community (currently limited to historians) including new researchers from the fields of architecture, engineering and land management.