The Max Wildiers Fund is an allowance that is made available by the Flemish Community for the Scientific Research Foundation. With this allowance, the Scientific Research Foundation supports projects to open up archives in a scientific way. These projects are carried out in cooperation between universities and Flemish archival institutions and are related to archives with a Flemish component. These projects take 4 years at the maximum. 19 projects started in the course of the year 2000, one of which is the DAVID-project.

The Antwerp City Archives are a part of the city's administration. Tasks are spread among 4 departments: records management, material care, public service and accessibility.

• The records management department controls the records of the administration of Antwerp. This control focuses at the conservation, access and appraisal of the records. Drawing up guidelines is one of the main consequences of this control.
  In view of the objectives of DAVID, namely the production of guidelines concerning digital archives and records, the project is added to this department.
• The department of material transfers records to the City Archives and takes care of the conservation of these documents.
• Public Services manages reading room and library of the City Archives.
• And the department responsible for accessibility calendars the documents at the Archives.

The Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and Information Technology (known by its acronym ICRI, which is derived from the Dutch name of the Centre, -Interdisciplinair Centrum voor Recht en Informatica) is a research centre within the Faculty of Law. It is directed by Prof.dr. Jos Dumortier. The Centre consists of three different research teams which deal with the following areas:

• Information Technology Law: this includes legal aspects of the internet and of information security, personal data protection, IT contracts, law enforcement in cyberspace, legal aspects of Electronic Data Interchange in the public sector, and electronic signatures. It is within this research domain that the DAVID-project can be located.
• Telecommunications Law: international telecommunications law, European competition law in the telecommunications market and legal consequences of the convergence between the audio-visual and the telecommunications sectors.
• Legal Informatics: legal knowledge representation, legal information retrieval and automatic indexing and abstracting..