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This article shows that metadata plays a central role in our society and concludes that through collaborative work, it is possible to pool solutions and to establish relationships of cooperation, both at the level of practical tool development and with regard to sharing and creating knowledge and know-how. ispartof: ABB: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique - Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:135-144 status: published

How can researchers identify suitable research data repositories for the deposit of their research data? Which repository matches best the technical and legal requirements of a specific research project? For this end and with a humanities perspective the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS) has been developed as a prototype. It not only serves as a functional service for selecting humanities research data repositories but it is particularly a technical demonstrator illustrating the potential of re-using an already existing infrastructure - in this case re3data - and the feasibility to set up this kind of service for other research disciplines. The documentation and the code of this project can be found in the DARIAH GitHub repository: ​https://dariah-eric.github.io/ddrs/​.

A defining feature of data and data workflows in the arts and humanities domain is their dependence on cultural heritage sources hosted and curated in museums, libraries, galleries and archives. A major difficulty when scholars interact with heritage data is that the nature of the cooperation between researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions and the researchers working in CHIs (henceforth CHIs) is often constrained by structural and legal challenges but even more by uncertainties as to the expectations of both parties.This recognition led several European organizations such as APEF, CLARIN, Europeana, E-RIHS to come together and join forces under the governance of DARIAH to set up principles and mechanisms for improving the conditions for the use and re-use of cultural heritage data issued by cultural heritage institutions and studied and enriched by researchers. As a first step of this joint effort is the Heritage Data Reuse Charter (https://datacharter.hypotheses.org/) establishes 6 basic principles for improving the use and re-use of cultural heritage resources by researchers and , to help all the relevant actors to work together to connect and improve access to heritage data. These are: Reciprocity, Interoperability, Citability, Openness, Stewardship and Trustworthiness.As a further step in translating these principles to actual data workflows the survey below serves as a template to frame exchanges around cultural heritage data by enabling both Cultural Heritage Institutions, infrastructure providers and researchers and to clarify their goals at the beginning and the project, to specify access to data, provenance information, preferred citation standards, hosting responsibilities etc. on the basis of which the parties can arrive at mutual reuse agreements that could serve as a starting point for a FAIR-by-construction data management, right from the project planning/application phase. In practice, the survey below can be flexibly applied in platform-independent ways in exchange protocols between Cultural Heritage Institutions and researchers, Institutions who sign the Charter could use it (and expect to use such surveys) in their own exchange protocols. Another direction of future developments is to set up a platform dedicated to such exchanges. On the other hand, researchers are encouraged to contact the CHIs during the initial stages of their project in order to explain their plans and figure details of transaction together. This mutual declaration can later be a powerful component in their Data Management Plans as it shows evidence for responsible and fair conduct of cultural heritage data, and fair (but also FAIR) research data management practices that are based on partnership with the holding institution. As enclosing a Research Data Management Plan to grant applications is becoming a more and more common requirement among research funders, we need to raise the funders’ awareness to the fact that such bi- or trilateral agreements and data reuse declarations among researchers, CHIs and infrastructure providers are crucial domain-specific components of FAIR data management.

There is a growing need to establish domain-or discipline-specific approaches to research data sharing workflows. A defining feature of data and data workflows in the arts and humanities domain is their dependence on cultural heritage sources hosted and curated in museums, libraries, galleries and archives. A major difficulty when scholars interact with heritage data is that the nature of the cooperation between researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions (henceforth CHIs) is often constrained by structural and legal challenges but even more by uncertainties as to the expectations of both parties. The Heritage Data Reuse Charter aims to address these by designing a common environment that will enable all the relevant actors to work together to connect and improve access to heritage data and make transactions related to the scholarly use of cultural heritage data more visible and transparent. As a first step, a wide range of stakeholders on the Cultural Heritage and research sector agreed upon a set of generic principles, summarized in the Mission Statement of the Charter, that can serve as a baseline governing the interactions between CHIs, researchers and data centres. This was followed by a long and thorough validation process related to these principles through surveys 1 and workshops 2. As a second step, we now put forward a questionnaire template tool that helps researchers and CHIs to translate the 6 core principles into specific research project settings. It contains questions about access to data, provenance information, preferred citation standards, hosting responsibilities etc. on the basis of which the parties can arrive at mutual reuse agreements that could serve as a starting point for a FAIR-by-construction data management, right from the project planning/application phase. The questionnaire template and the resulting mutual agreements can be flexibly applied to projects of different scale and in platform-independent ways. Institutions can embed them into their own exchange protocols while researchers can add them to their Data Management Plans. As such, they can show evidence for responsible and fair conduct of cultural heritage data, and fair (but also FAIR) research data management practices that are based on partnership with the holding institution.

For many libraries, mass digitisation has become routine. Digitisation centres are available in many places and there is a wealth of online platforms for the presentation of a wide variety of different media. Current projects from ETH Library reveal the directions in which the enormous potential harboured in these platforms and the millions of digital copies already produced may evolve. Research partnerships play just as important a role here as active user participation and intensified outreach. HAL Archive

This article presents a study of the French-speaking digital humanities. It is based on the experience of two research engineers from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who have been studying these issues for the last ten years. They conducted a survey at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS-Paris) which enabled them to draw up an overview of the transformation of the profession of humanities and social sciences research engineers in the context of the digital humanities. The Digit_Hum initiative, which they run in parallel with their respective activities at the ENS, also provided information for this overview thanks to its role as a space for discussion about the digital humanities along with training and structuring of this field at the ENS and the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL). Cet article est une réflexion sur les humanités numériques en contexte francophone. Elle s’appuie sur l'expérience de deux ingénieures du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique travaillant sur ces questions depuis une dizaine d'années. À travers l'enquête qu'elles ont menée à l'École normale supérieure (ENS-Paris), elles dressent un panorama de la transformation du métier d'ingénieur(e) en sciences humaines et sociales dans le contexte des humanités numériques. L'initiative Digit_Hum, qu'elles animent en parallèle de leurs activités respectives à l'École, nourrit également ce témoignage en constituant un espace de discussions, de formations et de structuration des humanités numériques au sein de l'ENS et de l’Université Paris Sciences & Lettres.

This article tackles the issue of integrating heterogeneous archival sources in one single data repository, namely the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal, whose aim is to support Holocaust research by providing online access to information about dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust (http://portal.ehri-project.eu). In this case, the problem at hand is to combine data coming from a network of archives in order to create an interoperable data space which can be used to search for, retrieve and disseminate content in the context of archival-based research. The scholarly purpose has specific consequences on our task. It assumes that the information made available to the researcher is as close as possible to the originating source in order to guarantee that the ensuing analysis can be deemed reliable. In the EHRI network of archives, as already observed in the case of the EU Cendari project, one cannot but face heterogeneity. The EHRI portal brings together descriptions from more than 1900 institutions. Each archive comes with a whole range of idiosyncrasies corresponding to the way it has been set up and evolved over time. Cataloging practices may also differ. Even the degree of digitization may range from the absence of a digital catalogue to the provision of a full-fledged online catalogue with all the necessary APIs for anyone to query and extract content. There is indeed a contrast here with the global endeavour at the international level to develop and promote standards for the description of archival content as a whole. Nonetheless, in a project like EHRI, standards should play a central role. They are necessary for many tasks related to the integration and exploitation of the aggregated content, namely: ● Being able to compare the content of the various sources, thus being able to develop quality-checking processes; ● Defining of an integrated repository infrastructure where the content of the various archival sources can be reliably hosted; ● Querying and re-using content in a seamless way; ● Deploying tools that have been developed independently of the specificities of the information sources, for instance in order to visualise or mine the resulting pool of information. The central aspect of the work described in this paper is the assessment of the role of the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) standard as the basis for achieving the tasks described above. We have worked out how we could develop a real strategy of defining specific customization of EAD that could be used at various stages of the process of integrating heterogeneous sources. While doing so, we have developed a methodology based on a specification and customization method inspired from the extensive experience of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community. In the TEI framework, as we show in section 1, one has the possibility to model specific subsets or extensions of the TEI guidelines while maintaining both the technical (XML schemas) and editorial (documentation) content within a single framework. This work has led us quite far in anticipating that the method we have developed may be of a wider interest within similar environments, but also, as we believe, for the future maintenance of the EAD standard. Finally this work, successfully tested and implemented in the framework of EHRI [Riondet 2017], can be seen as part of the wider endeavour of European research infrastructures in the humanities such as CLARIN and DARIAH to provide support for researchers to integrate the use of standards in their scholarly practices. This is the reason why the general workflow studied here has been introduced as a use case in the umbrella infrastructure project PARTHENOS which aims, among other things, at disseminating information and resources about methodological and technical standards in the humanities.

Contemporary researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities and opportunities of digital humanities, but encounter major obstacles regarding (meta)data1. Many archival institutions lack the technology or the skills to process (meta)data, let alone share it. Different types of standards coexist and sometimes conflict with each other, while implementing the same standards often leads to slight differences which decrease interoperability. Storing, securing and making born-digital or digitized information available in a sustainable manner is a major challenge. Concepts such as metadata, Meta Information, Linked Open Data (LOD), Big Data… are on the rise, but their meaning and content — let alone their implications in terms of social impact — are seldom questioned. Archival institutions thus face a myriad of challenges when sharing (meta)data with the scientific community and when planning to preserve information for future generations while maintaining data authenticity2 . ispartof: Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:5-13 status: published

International audience; One of the funded project proposals under DARIAH’s Open Humanities call 2015 was “Open History: Sustainable digital publishing of archival catalogues of twentieth-century history archives”. Based on the experiences of the Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the main goal of the “Open History” project was to enhance the dialogue between (meta-)data providers and research infrastructures. Integrating archival descriptions – when they were already available – held at a wide variety of twentieth-century history archives (from classic archives to memorial sites, libraries and private archives) into research infrastructures has proven to be a major challenge, which could not be done without some degree of limited to extensive pre-processing or other preparatory work. The “Open History” project organized two workshops and developed two tools: an easily accessible and general article on why the practice of standardization and sharing is important and how this can be achieved; and a model which provides checklists for self-analyses of archival institutions. The text that follows is the article we have developed. It intentionally remains at a general level, without much jargon, so that it can be easily read by those who are non-archivists or non-IT. Hence, we hope it will be easy to understand for both those who are describing the sources at various archives (with or without IT or archival sciences degrees), as well as decision-makers (directors and advisory boards) who wish to understand the benefits of investing in standardization and sharing of data. It is important to note is that this text is a first step, not a static, final result. Not all aspects about standardization and publication of (meta-)data are discussed, nor are updates or feedback mechanisms for annotations and comments discussed. The idea is that this text can be used in full or in part and that it will include further chapters and section updates as time goes by and as other communities begin using it. Some archives will read through much of these and see confirmation of what they have already been implementing; others – especially the smaller institutions, such as private memory institutions – will find this a low-key and hands-on introduction to help them in their efforts.