The Trend and Intellectual Structure of Digital Archives Research

Archives are an extremely valuable part of cultural heritage since they represent the trace of the activities of a juridical person or organization in the course of their business. Through various information technology (IT), tremendous amount of digital archives (DA) are created. These archives are the basis for providing evidence and knowledge in everlasting memory of human society. The management of digital archives becomes a fast growing field throughout last decade and introduces abundant articles in academia. However, their trend and intellectual structure have remained obscure in the research community. To map the trend and intellectual structure of DA research, this study identifies the high-impact articles as well as the correlations among these scholar publications. In this study, text mining techniques, such as co-word and cluster analysis, have been deployed to investigate the intellectual pillars of the DA literature. This study exposes researchers to a new way of profiling knowledge networks and their relationships in the research area of DA, thereby helping academia and practitioners better understand up-to-date studies. The results of the mapping can help identify the research direction of DA research, provide a valuable tool for researchers to access DA literature, and act as an exemplary model for future research.