IANUS is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with the objective to build up a digital archive for archaeology and ancient studies in Germany. A first three year phase of conceptual work is now being followed by a second, in which the concepts get implemented and the data centre begins its operational work.Data curation is essential for preservation of digital data and helps to detect errors, aggregate documentation, ensure the reusability of data and in some cases even add further functionality and additional files. This paper will present the workflow of data curation based on a data collection about European vertebrate fauna and will exemplify the different data processing stages at IANUS according to the OAIS model – from its initial submission until its final presentation on the recently established data portal. One aspect of this will be the discussion of the archival information package. To enable and ease the reusability of research data, it is useful to enrich the data. This includes the GIS integration of geographic informations and reutilisation of bibliography. Finally a re-use scenario of research data stored in the IANUS repository will be presented that offers researchers a unified search and discovery facilities over several distributed and heterogeneous datasets by using Semantic Web technologies.