CONNECTED: Connecting trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories

The Arts and Humanities Research Council continues to invest in new and existing data infrastructure for research. From specialist resources such as the Archaeology Data Service and Oxford Text Archive, to more general resources such as the British Library's shared research repository, these investments continue to grow and support the UKs arts and humanities scholars.

Our project, 'CONNECTED: Connecting trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories', will begin work to provide 'the glue' to bring together a distributed repository landscape.

A distributed set of repositories provides benefits in terms of allowing specialist and expert management of a wider range of research and highly variable research outputs. But such an environment faces challenges and inefficiencies that reduce its impact. These include difficulties in discovery and access, but also questions around the relationships between specialised vs general services.

As more repositories evolve to suit more digital approaches to research, so increases the potential for duplication of effort from a (re)searcher/author/depositor perspective.

CONNECTED will explore how to build greater coherence and interoperability that will increase the impact of AHRC investment and provide benefits for users. We will seek to understand how to build and resource a unified framework that actively enables efficient management and discovery of content. This will bring a plan to link different trusted repositories as a distributed service that can grow over time as new individual services are added.

Over the 5-month period of the project we will:

Use a series of semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders including researchers, librarians, curators and information technologists to understand their needs, gaps in provision, and approaches that allow for the widest set of content and use cases to be addressed. This will include an exploration of how to connect current and planned investments across AHRC infrastructure, where appropriate.

These insights will be fed into strategic and service models for delivering the connecting components of a national-scale data service, that can be fully scoped and costed.

Finally, the project will explore the feasibility of a national scale switchboard service for routing data and outputs to the most appropriate repository. An approach will be developed that will then be explored with a community workshop to understand the appetite for a deposit-routing service.