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
Type
Memory Institution
Co-Spokesperson
Prof. Dr. Gerald Maier
gerald.maier@la-bw.de