The digital evolution of our society is increasingly affecting and enabling research in the humanities where digital resources and cultural data sets are now being considered as valuable research material. This evolution has increased the need for infrastructures and web environments where researchers from the humanities can collaboratively work on their data and even actively involve citizens. In addition, policymakers and funders are strongly in favour of projects with such an IT component. As a result, new tools, databases, and data models sprout from every research project; the original goal of sharing and collaboration surpassed by the conviction that there is a need for this particular software or that custom developed database. This is not entirely a bad thing since it also drives innovation and brings new perspectives to the use of digital components in research. The problem lies more in the sustainability of the developed tools and databases after the projects’ lifetime. Neither funders nor universities are able to maintain all the infrastructures conceived. And while providing storage and access to the data produced is more manageable, data sets still often lack the information needed to find, interpret and reuse them. Also for university service providers, there are many challenges to overcome when collaborating with humanities research groups in the development of their research infrastructures.
At LIBIS, the library information department of KU Leuven (Belgium), we collaborate with multiple research groups from the Humanities for the development and continued support of their virtual research environment. In these projects, we experienced multiple challenges, the main ones being a lack of clear use cases and requirements, a sometimes-limited technical know-how of the researcher, a too small development budget in comparison to the high expectations and especially a lack of financial means for the continued maintenance and support of the systems after the project’s lifetime. Together with the research groups, we try to find the best solutions and compromises. This has resulted in the use of tools that we traditionally use for our museum and heritage partners such as CollectiveAccess and Omeka. While these open source systems were mainly conceived for the management and display of heritage collections, both are extremely flexible in the configuration and have a large user and developer community contributing to new plug-ins and functionalities. In combination with new open source software components such as Mirador (IIIF), we help them build a sustainable research environment based on open principles and web standards.
This presentation focuses on a growing number of Digital Humanities infrastructure projects in which tools such as CollectiveAccess and Omeka have been used in combination with other open source and proprietary systems in order to provide a sustainable and innovative environment for different humanities research groups. We like to share our experiences on the active collaboration with the researchers in the writing of project proposals and the design and development of their infrastructures as well as provide a set of recommendations concerning the selection of tools and standards to guarantee a long-lasting collaboration. LIBIS is a service provider of digital information solutions at KU Leuven and a division of Leuven Research and Development (LRD) as well as a part of the University Library.
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