Co-Applicant

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) is one of the largest universities of applied sciences (HAW) in Germany. Founded in 1971, it offers over 60 study programmes in the fields of arts and sciences for around 16,000 students. Applied research and development play a key role at the h_da. The h_da is one of the few universities of applied sciences in Germany with the independent right to award doctorates in its strong research areas of sustainability sciences, applied computer science and social work. The right to award doctorates is exercised in specially established doctoral centers, which serve as a platform for bundling the university’s particular research strengths.

The Institute for Communication and Media (ikum) was founded in 2015 in the Media Department of the h_da. The ikum brings together several different research projects, such as those on the use of digital research data in the arts and humanities, on questions of the digitisation of cultural heritage and in the fields of digital humanities, digital scholarly editions, and data literacy more generally. These research perspectives are addressed primarily from an information and library-science perspective. The members of ikum are active in a variety of national and international professional associations and organisations such as KIBA and IFLA. The h_da is also involved in several national research infrastructures, e.g. in the humanities-oriented consortia DARIAH-DE and NFDI4Culture as well as, from an engineering perspective, in NFDI4Ing. The topic of building up research data infrastructures is especially central to its interests, as the h_da, along with all other Hessian universities and universities of applied sciences, is involved in the state-wide research-data initiative HeFDI. Within this framework, in addition to the development of digital services for research data management, further education and training courses in the field of data literacy are being established. This field is located at the transdisciplinary interface between engineering and the humanities on the one hand and information-, computer- and library science on the other. Also within the framework of HeFDI, a long-term archiving architecture is being established to store local repository research data cross-locationally and with persistent referencing.

Team

 

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

TA 4 Data Literacy

Type

Scholarly and Research Institution

Co-Spokesperson

Prof. Dr. Stefan Schmunk

stefan.schmunk@h-da.de

Website

Profile Web Page

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is one of the largest European universal libraries and of world renown as an international research library and heritage institution. It forms part of Germany's virtual national library and is the central state library and repository library of the Free State of Bavaria. Its total holdings amount to around 34 million items,among these almost 10.9 million books, over 54,000 current periodicals in electronic and printed form, 17 million photographs/images and 140,000 manuscripts. Every year approximately 125,000 volumes are added to its collections. Furthermore, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek holds the largest digital data stock of all German libraries with more than 2.5 million digitised works, around 960 million image files or a memory space of one petabyte. Around 70 percent of its copyright-free holdings are freely accessible on the Internet. Besides the professional digitisation of manuscripts, books, newspaper issues and special materials, the library’s own Munich Digitisation Center (MDZ) develops software and research tools, for example “image-based similarity search”, the newspaper portal “digiPress” or the standard “International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)”. In addition, the MDZ secures the contents for future generations by long-term archiving.

The Library’s other sophisticated digital services include four Specialised Information Services (Ancient Studies; Historical Studies; East, Central and Southeast European Studies; Musicology). Furthermore, it operates bavarikon, the internet portal of the Free State of Bavaria for the presentation of art, culture and stocks of knowledge from Bavarian institutions. Moreover, one of the Staatsbibliothek’s departments is the Head Office of the Bavarian Library Network. It is the regional service and competence center for all the library network’s members. Its responsibilities include the development, provision and support of high-performance library applications, competent counselling and support regarding essential questions of information technology and innovative solutions.

 

Team

 

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 2: Data Connectivity

Type

Memory Institution

Co-Spokesperson

FIZ Karlsruhe makes significant contributions to the information infrastructure by supporting researchers in science, the humanities and industry worldwide. FIZ Karlsruhe curates and indexes large amounts of patent information and research data from various sources. Nearly 300 employees develop and operate innovative information services and e-research solutions for precise research and intelligent analysis of these data. FIZ Karlsruhe conducts applied research in close collaboration with academic and research organisations and acts as an experienced partner in national and European research projects. FIZ Karlsruhe is engaged in several high-level working groups and committees that address information infrastructure and digital preservation issues in national and international contexts. The department e-Research (IEE), led by Matthias Razum, focusses on research data management, digital long-term archiving and virtual research environments. With a strong background in software engineering, it has participated in or led projects like National Hosting of Electronic Resources, RADAR (research data repository), German Newspaper Portal, TOPORAZ (digital space-time model for networked research) and Time Machine Europe. It oversees the operation and software development of the German Digital Library (DBB) and German Archives Portal. IEE brings extensive experience with software development in the humanities and services such as RADAR to the consortium. The research department Information Service Engineering (ISE), led by Prof. Harald Sack, covers semantic technologies, knowledge discovery, ontological engineering and exploratory search. ISE brings profound experience with the design, implementation and exploitation of ontologies, knowledge graphs and linked data to the consortium. Intellectual property rights in distributed information infrastructures (IGR), led by Prof. Franziska Boehm, deals with copyright, IT (security) and data protection law on a German and EU level. Compliance with data protection and copyright laws are important to the NFDI4Memory community when it comes to the collection, storage and re-use of research data.

 

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

TA 3 Data Services

Type

Infrastructure Institution

Co-Spokesperson

Baden-Wuerttemberg State Archives are esteemed beyond Germany as a leading research infrastructure institution and as a centre for regional studies. It has decades of experience in the fields of digitisation and the online presentation of cultural assets. Catalogue information and digitised archival material are made available to researchers both in the archives’ own system of online finding aids and in various comprehensive portals. The LABW is a founding member of the Competence Network of the German Digital Library (DDB), operator of the DDB ingest agency for archives and member of the DDB Board of Directors. Thereby, it represents both the interests of the archives community and of users in the DDB's steering committees. In addition, the LABW is involved in the German Archives Portal (AP-D). AP-D is the central infrastructure for networked research of digital sources and for indexing information from German archives.

By developing the above-mentioned information systems, the LABW plays a major role in the conception and distribution of data-exchange formats and standards – EAD (DDB), archival METS/MODS profile –  and in the further development of the DFG Viewer. LABW is an active partner for historical research in numerous third-party funded cooperation projects. The DFG project "GND4C - GND for Cultural Data" –  in which the LABW represents the archives sector and, within the project, deals with geographic entities –  focuses on  the requirements for  a comprehensive semantic network among  the data of different infrastructure institutions. In the field of historical scholarship, the LABW offers the  watermark information system and the "Südwestdeutsche Archivalienkunde''. With DIMAG, the LABW has created one of Germany's leading infrastructures for digital archiving. It is constantly developing the system in cooperation with other federal states and partner institutions. The system follows the international standard and reference model for an Open Archive Information System (OAIS). LABW is also actively involved in the nestor competence network (Competence Network for Long-term Archiving and Long-term Availability of Digital Resources for Germany). Finally, it is strengthening its activities in the fields of the optimisation of digital research data and research data management through the third-party funded project FDMLab@LABW, which started in 2020. The project aims to establish a basic infrastructure in the field of e-science and research data management in order to contribute substantially to the establishment of the NFDI.

 

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

TA 3 Data Services

Type

Memory Institution

Co-Spokesperson

Trier University is a middle-sized university with a strong profile in the humanities and social sciences, psychology and environmental sciences situated at the western border of Rhineland-Palatinate (RLP). It is a member of the Université de la Grande Region (UniGR) with close connections to Belgian, French and Luxemburg research institutions and universities. Over the last two decades Trier University’s history department has continuously developed its profile in research-oriented digital history, covering the longue durée from ancient to contemporary history. Trier’s historically oriented research community creates, curates and uses a broad array of different data types (see Appendix and LoC). Two collaborative research centers (SFB 235 and 600) and several data-driven research projects have explored and established innovative digital research tools, research techniques, workflows and research infrastructures, including simulation techniques, network visualisation, topic modelling and time-specific controlled vocabularies. Members of the history faculty are engaged in the development of a data culture in historically oriented disciplines by serving in advisory boards of historical associations (VHD, AG Sozialdaten und Zeitgeschichte, OAH) and as experts on scientific boards of digital data centres and initiatives on national and international levels. Based on its experience in collaborative historical research in longue durée perspectives, Trier University has developed tools and services for collaborative research data management in the humanities. Today, the Virtual Research Environment "FuD" serves the needs of the history community in Germany and beyond. It offers a research infrastructure that combines hermeneutic text analysis, quantitative data analysis and cartographic methods and that is capable of handling and processing a broad range of digital historical sources, including audio-visual, textual, numerical and geographical data. In order to support humanities researchers in developing and implementing IT-based research-projects, UT has established the Service Center eSciences (SeS). By coordinating and implementing UT’s RDM strategy, it is responsible for RDM-consultations and training. It has developed the DIAMANT-Model including an RDM competence profile and a qualification concept to implement and support an RDM service landscape in research institutions. SeS has also developed the virtual data repository VIDA for long-term preservation of different historical data domains. VIDA will become the long-term archiving infrastructure of RLP and SeS will serve as one the coordinators of RLP’s research data management strategy. UT also participates in the NFDI consortium +text and contributes to the cross-cutting topics data rights and data ethics with its Institut für Recht und Digitalisierung (IRDT).

 

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 4: Data Literacy

Type

Scholarly, Research and Infrastructure Institution

Co-Spokesperson