DigiSpec: Scoping future born-digital data services for the arts and humanities

The digital research infrastructure for arts, humanities and cultural heritage research has evolved to support an extraordinary range of diverse content types. Some of the digital content comes from digitization of collections, and increasingly digital methods of capture and transcription in the process of research, but there is now a very significant volume and diversity of new content which is "born digital" - from the digital documents that have replaced the manuscripts of old, to the Web itself and to social media.

As citizens interact with the digital world they generate a new digital record, and this is crucial to the study of society, of culture - of the arts and humanities of the digital age, today and tomorrow.

This scoping project will investigate this landscape and provide clear recommendations for a national infrastructure capability to collect, curate and analyse born-digital content. It brings together two partners who are very distinctively placed to conduct this study. The National Archives already deals with extensive born-digital content from Government, unique in extent within the Independent Research Organisations, and has developed infrastructure solutions for their growing digital content.

The Oxford e-Research Centre has been developing digital methods and infrastructure solutions since its inception 15-years ago, working across disciplines and with specialisms in arts and humanities, hence uniquely positioned to contextualise born-digital content infrastructure for Arts and Humanities.

The project will create an evidence base through stakeholder consultation and case studies, to understand the needs of the Arts and Humanities research community with respect to born digital data and complex digital objects, and to anticipate future requirements. Based on this it will propose a specification for the design, build and implementation of a research and innovation infrastructure for Arts and Humanities, which can integrate with other infrastructure capabilities.

Recognising the importance of people and skills, it will also define a programme of skills and capacity building for the arts and humanities scholarly community in order to maximise the benefit of investment in infrastructure and tools for born-digital data and complex digital objects, which is also key to sustainability.