FDM-Services
The core business of the Data Centre for the Humanities (DCH) is to provide advice, mediation and active support to all researchers at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and beyond on issues relating to research data management (RDM) in the humanities. In personal consultations, the DCH staff try to find out information about a project and/or concerns and the corresponding framework conditions in order to provide customised advice, mediate or develop solutions on this basis. Such a counselling process can ultimately involve several sessions together, without a time limit.
The DCH distinguishes between five different categories of counselling processes:
- General RDM counselling,
- Application consultations/participation ("ab ovo"),
- Accompanying research data management ("in vitae"), e.g. in ongoing large-scale projects,
- Assistance with ending or completed projects ("post mortem"),
- Supply of "legacy data", i.e. collections that were collected some time ago and whose author and processor are no longer available.
General RDM Consulting | Request via e-mail: ✉
If you have questions about individual aspects of research data management in relation to your research work, the DCH will be happy to advise you. We can support you with third-party funding applications, data management plans, the digital publication of research data, copyright and licences, data backup during a project, archiving, data security, technical solutions, the preservation of living systems, etc., or put you in touch with other competent contacts.
Support for Applications | Request via e-mail: ✉
DCH advises and supports you in developing your proposal (e.g. in formulating section 2.4 of a DFG proposal, in developing a data management plan for a BMBF proposal and all other aspects of comprehensive RDM planning as part of a proposal to other third-party funding organisations). In addition to support with the formulation or review of text sections on research data management, there is also the possibility of the DCH taking over RDM aspects in the form of proposal participation.
Accompanying RDM | Request via e-mail: ✉
The DCH actively advises and supports you in the appropriate and efficient handling of your research data during a project. In addition to recommending and communicating storage and backup options and developing workflows, e.g. for collaborative work on data, this also includes support in curating and enriching your data, designing and implementing backup routines and generally planning and implementing an overall RDM strategy for your project.
Resource Management | Request via e-mail: ✉
Living systems are often the results of research processes. These are usually project websites, interactive visualisations, but also forms of dynamic applications, tools or databases that can be access layers to research data. The DCH advises you on the identification of possibilities to ensure that these systems are accessible and reusable for as long as possible and require as little maintenance as possible. At the same time, the DCH sometimes takes over such resources itself, e.g. in the form of providing static websites.
Archiving | Request via e-mail: ✉
The DCH actively advises and supports you in archiving your research data. In addition to providing and recommending solution strategies, the DCH takes on the long-term, institutional archiving of research data collections, in particular non-public data, using magnetic tape archiving via the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) at the Regional Computing Centre (RRZK). In addition, the data centre operates its own repository for audiovisual language data, the Language Archive Cologne (LAC) (see below).
Data Publication Services | Request via e-mail: ✉
The DCH also offers publication in selected external systems as a service. The generic research data repository Zenodo is particularly relevant here. It is very suitable for research data that is to be published openly accessible according to the FAIR principles and for which there are no subject-specific offers. In addition to advisory support for data publication, the DCH also offers automated workflows for publishing large quantities of datasets on Zenodo. For the archiving and publication of archaeological data, the DCH has developed workflows together with the African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC) to implement quality control and publication for large data sets in the systems of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI).
Audiovisual (AV) Data | Request via e-mail: ✉
AV data is an important data type for the DCH. The DCH has proven expertise in the area of AV language data and the associated metadata in particular. The Language Archive Cologne (LAC) is available for AV data, which is made available there specifically for this area of research, including preparation using linguistic annotations, and released for use online. In the BMBF joint project QUEST, the DCH has developed quality standards for AV language data, focussing in particular on metadata. AV data is one of the areas of expertise that the DCH contributes to the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Linguistic Diversity and Language Documentation (CKLD).
Data Interfaces | Request via e-mail: ✉
Data publication via well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs) is a central component of our data publication and sustainability strategy. We provide data via REST and GraphQL interfaces that can be reused by local and external projects. This form of publication enables flexible reuse in a variety of contexts and structures. One current focus is the publication of lexical resources, especially of non-European languages: C-SALT APIs for Dicitionaries, Kosh - APIs for Dictionaries.
In principle, we advise and support you in every project phase. However, the earlier we are involved, the better and more extensive we can advise you or support a project. Please also note that the long-term maintenance of resources beyond project funding can entail considerable administrative, technical and ultimately also financial expenditure and therefore not every project can be realised on a one-size-fits-all basis. However, it is possible to apply different continuation models, adapted to the financial framework and after assessing the long-term requirements.