RDM 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.
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.
Support for Applications | Request via e-mail: ✉
DCH advises and supports you in developing your proposal for every funding institution. 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 and designing and implementing backup routines.
RDM-On-/Offboarding | Requests via e-mail ✉
With the RDM onboarding and offboarding services, we offer specific support at the beginning and end of a project. The two DCH services are divided into different requirement levels and include support in the development, planning and practical implementation of RDM workflows as well as RDM training in the RDM onboarding area and support in the development of publication and archiving strategies in the RDM offboarding area.
Resource Management | Request via e-mail: ✉
Living systems are often the results of research processes. These are usually websites, interactive visualisations, forms of dynamic applications, tools or databases that can be access layers to research data. The DCH advises you on the identification of solutions to ensure that these systems are accessible and reusable. 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, 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 IT Center University of Cologne (ITCC). The DCH also operates its own repository for audiovisual language data, the Language Archive Cologne (LAC).
Data Publication Services | Request via e-mail: ✉
The DCH offers publication in selected external systems as a service. The generic research data repository Zenodo is particularly relevant here, the DCH offers automated workflows for publishing large quantities of datasets on Zenodo. It has also developed workflows together with the African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC) for the publication for large data sets in the systems of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI).
Audiovisual (AV) Data | Request via e-mail: ✉
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. 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.
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.