Digitisation Forum

Round table on the digitisation strategy

HAdW

On 13th July 2018, the Heidelberg Academy hosted its first round table on the topic of ‘Digital long-term archiving’. The purpose of this round table was to explore the possibilities for the practical implementation of long-term archiving of research data.

As the science academy of the state of Baden-Württemberg, the HAdW is responsible for various long-term research projects (internal link) at a total of three university locations (Freiburg, Heidelberg, Tübingen). These research projects, which mainly focus on the research fields of dictionaries, editions and the indexing of material corpora, have large databases that are constantly growing. Digital working environments, often in the form of databases, are often used to support the work. These digital working environments and tools are adapted to the needs of the research group and the research subject. The Academy thus concentrates a large number of experts in the digital humanities, whose expertise can be used to better position the Academy as such with regard to issues of digital research environments, long-term archiving (LTA) and the subsequent use of data.

However, in order to implement a modern digitisation strategy, HAdW also needs the support of strategically important partners, namely the state universities and especially their libraries and data centres, which in some cases are already very productively and successfully involved in collaborations. The purpose of this discussion round is to sound out the possibilities of the HAdW for the practical implementation of its digitisation strategy, in particular the long-term archiving (LTA) and, above all, the long-term availability of the data.

As part of the event, both the academy projects and the libraries and computer centres at those locations where HAdW has projects were given the opportunity to exchange information on the topic of long-term availability, with a focus on the following topics:

• Presentation of the digital working environments of the HAdW research centres: Which research centre uses which system? Which interfaces are there? Where is the data stored? Is there a back-up (and where)? Which data formats (standards) are used?
• How do the research centres envisage support from the HAdW with regard to (functional) long-term archiving in the future?
• What opportunities do facilities offer? Where are there points of contact? What could the research centres utilise? What are the prerequisites for cooperation between HAdW/research centres and the relevant institutions?
• What does the HAdW have to do? Could the HAdW take on an intermediary role between projects and computer centres/university libraries?
• Where are there points of contact for setting up joint projects?

Programme

Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer (interner Link)