About the DCH
Digital research data is increasingly being created in all humanities projects today. These are the basis for printed and digital publications, or become part of the inventory of complex information systems and web applications. Documenting research data and research results sustainably and completely for future generations, preserving them, keeping them accessible, making them citable and presenting them permanently entails organisational, personnel and technical challenges that many project managers and institutions can hardly cope with on their own. In the interests of good scientific practice, all digital data and results must remain permanently accessible beyond the limited duration of projects and funding, regardless of personnel and institutional changes. Ensuring this is now also a key approval criterion for project applications from scientific and funding organisations.
The Data Centre for the Humanities (DCH) was founded in December 2012 to actively advise and support researchers at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cologne with questions and challenges in research data management (RDM).
The Data Centre collects source data and digital results from research in the humanities and ensures that they are permanently accessible and usable. It supports projects in the field of research data management, helps with the sustainable processing of research results and ensures their ongoing presentation via project-specific and cross-project publication interfaces. The DCH thus offers professional support for digital research that fulfils current standards such as the criteria of good scientific practice and the FAIR principles ("Findable, Accessible, Reusable, Interoperable").
Most recently, the Cologne Data Centre was once again sustainably strengthened in the implementation of its mission with the adoption of its own statutes, the election of a management level and the appointment of an advisory board by the council meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities on 11 July 2018.
In this context, the DCH is working on the continuous and sustainable expansion of its own service and organisational profile with a clear focus on the needs of research in the humanities. Accordingly, the Cologne Data Centre is continuously formalising and standardising consulting and support processes, testing and further developing concepts for specific research data management needs and actively researching various aspects of research data management. In this sense, the DCH sees itself as a research- and practice-oriented service provider that, in close coordination with its local partners, the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), the Institute for Digital Humanities (IDH), the Regional Computing Centre (RRZK), the Cologne Competence Center for Research Data Management (C3RDM) and the University and City Library (USB), aims to address gaps in the advice and support of researchers and the supply of research data with a complementary range of services.
Support with research data management issues also includes teaching RDM skills and sensitising humanities scholars at the University of Cologne to the relevance of research data management as well as integrating research data management into the training of students and doctoral candidates.
The DCH is in close contact with other data centres, associations, committees and working groups as well as national and international initiatives and infrastructure projects, such as the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) or the humanities consortia for the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). The exchange serves to position the DCH in an increasingly differentiated research data landscape, ensures the connection to current developments and is the starting point for considerations on methodological convergence.