Storage and Application Diversity – Optimisation of a Sustainable Repository for Audio-Visual Research Data

Audiovisual research data is playing an increasingly important role in numerous humanities disciplines, including linguistics, musicology, ethnology and oral history. At the University of Cologne, there has been close cooperation between the faculty Data Centre for the Humanities (DCH), the Institute of Linguistics (IfL) and the IT Center University of Cologne (ITCC) in the field of linguistic research data for many years.

One result of this collaboration is the Cologne Centre for Archiving and Analysis of Audiovisual Data (KA³) and the KA³ repository developed by the Centre. The KA³ repository represents the technical core and the main service of the centre. The Language Archive Cologne (LAC) uses the services of the Cologne Centre to offer services for annotated audiovisual language data. The KA³ repository is a repository solution for audiovisual research data, which stores its data in a structured way using the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL).

The aim of KA³-OS (Object Storage) is to investigate the extent to which OCFL works robustly in different storage technologies and in interaction with audiovisual research data and thus represents a sustainable data structure for this data type and the associated annotations.