CONNECTED: Connecting trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories
Lead Research Organisation:
British Library
Department Name: Research Services
Abstract
The Arts and Humanities Research Council continues to invest in new and existing data infrastructure for research. From specialist resources such as the Archaeology Data Service and Oxford Text Archive, to more general resources such as the British Library's shared research repository, these investments continue to grow and support the UKs arts and humanities scholars. Our project, 'CONNECTED: Connecting trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories', will begin work to provide 'the glue' to bring together a distributed repository landscape.
A distributed set of repositories provides benefits in terms of allowing specialist and expert management of a wider range of research and highly variable research outputs. But such an environment faces challenges and inefficiencies that reduce its impact. These include difficulties in discovery and access, but also questions around the relationships between specialised vs general services. As more repositories evolve to suit more digital approaches to research, so increases the potential for duplication of effort from a (re)searcher/author/depositor perspective.
CONNECTED will explore how to build greater coherence and interoperability that will increase the impact of AHRC investment and provide benefits for users. We will seek to understand how to build and resource a unified framework that actively enables efficient management and discovery of content. This will bring a plan to link different trusted repositories as a distributed service that can grow over time as new individual services are added.
Over the 5-month period of the project we will:
Use a series of semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders including researchers, librarians, curators and information technologists to understand their needs, gaps in provision, and approaches that allow for the widest set of content and use cases to be addressed. This will include an exploration of how to connect current and planned investments across AHRC infrastructure, where appropriate.
These insights will be fed into strategic and service models for delivering the connecting components of a national-scale data service, that can be fully scoped and costed.
Finally, the project will explore the feasibility of a national scale switchboard service for routing data and outputs to the most appropriate repository. An approach will be developed that will then be explored with a community workshop to understand the appetite for a deposit-routing service.
A distributed set of repositories provides benefits in terms of allowing specialist and expert management of a wider range of research and highly variable research outputs. But such an environment faces challenges and inefficiencies that reduce its impact. These include difficulties in discovery and access, but also questions around the relationships between specialised vs general services. As more repositories evolve to suit more digital approaches to research, so increases the potential for duplication of effort from a (re)searcher/author/depositor perspective.
CONNECTED will explore how to build greater coherence and interoperability that will increase the impact of AHRC investment and provide benefits for users. We will seek to understand how to build and resource a unified framework that actively enables efficient management and discovery of content. This will bring a plan to link different trusted repositories as a distributed service that can grow over time as new individual services are added.
Over the 5-month period of the project we will:
Use a series of semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders including researchers, librarians, curators and information technologists to understand their needs, gaps in provision, and approaches that allow for the widest set of content and use cases to be addressed. This will include an exploration of how to connect current and planned investments across AHRC infrastructure, where appropriate.
These insights will be fed into strategic and service models for delivering the connecting components of a national-scale data service, that can be fully scoped and costed.
Finally, the project will explore the feasibility of a national scale switchboard service for routing data and outputs to the most appropriate repository. An approach will be developed that will then be explored with a community workshop to understand the appetite for a deposit-routing service.
Organisations
| Description | Data sharing and archiving in the arts and humanities is a growing area of practice, and repositories struggle with the challenges of storing and describing complex outputs and portfolios of work. In a distributed humanities data infrastructure, outputs are displayed and catalogued in diverse ways, making discovery and re-use more difficult. Researchers tell us that they DO NOT: ? Have the time to investigate options for data archiving ? Understand the repository landscape ? See their needs reflected in directories of repositories They need an active tool ('switchboard') which would use a minimal set of questions to matchmake datasets with a suitable repository, and take the researcher to the appropriate upload page. Without this, they simply will not deposit their data consistently. We found that this service would create direct, tangible value for researchers, repository owners, and funders alike. In addition, the scholarly ecosystem will benefit from better preservation, discovery, and impact of arts and humanities datasets. This project has delivered a tentative cost model and business model canvas to AHRC for activity that would deliver concrete benefits in connecting research across siloed repositories. |
| Exploitation Route | The cost model and business model canvas - as well as the reports on user research - can be used to develop and approach for missing data infrastructure in the arts and humanities. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |