FAIRer data through digital recording: the FAIMS mobile experience

Critical data and metadata must be captured or created in the field, or shortly thereafter, to avoid loss. For the past 10 years, the Field Acquired Information Management Systems (FAIMS) project has developed and operated a customisable field data capture platform. Over time, we built features and approaches that incorporated the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles into born-digital datasets created during fieldwork. This paper synthesises our experience helping more than 40 projects adapt the FAIMS platform to nearly 70 research workflows in archaeology and other fieldwork domains. We review what elements of the FAIR Data Principles FAIMS was able to build into our software, how users received these capabilities, and what sociotechnical challenges impeded creation of FAIRer field data. Based on our experience, we argue that field data capture software can facilitate the production of FAIRer data, making those data much more Findable and Reusable, and somewhat more Accessible and Interoperable. Any such improvements, however, depend upon (1) making FAIR-data features an integral part of field data collection systems, minimising the burden imposed on researchers, and (2) researchers’ willingness to spend time and resources implementing FAIR Data Principles that do not provide immediate benefits to their research.