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The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal website aims to aggregate digitally available archival descriptions concerning the Holocaust. This portal is actually a meta-catalogue, or an information aggregator, whose biggest goal is to have up-to-date information by means of building sustainable data pipelines between EHRI and its content providers. Just like in similar archival information aggregators (e.g. Archives Portal Europe or Monasterium), the XML-based metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) plays a key role. The article presents how EADs are imported into the portal, mainly thanks to the Open Archive Initiative protocols.

No abstract available.

Big-scale infrastructure projects in the humanities and social sciences such as the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) (Edmond et al., 2017), or the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) (Hinrichs and Krauwer, 2014) aim to provide solutions for both preservation and access to collections and data necessary for scholarly research (Zundert, 2012). Some infrastructure projects build decentralized “atomic” software services, e.g., as in the LLS infrastructure project (Buchler et al., 2016), while others prefer to build more centralized virtual research environments, as in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) (Lauer, 2014). Also, even within a single infrastructure project, these two models can coexist. This is the case of the CLARIAH infrastructure, where different approaches have been taken to date for serving different user groups, i.e., several specialized tools for linguists (Odijk, Broeder & Barbiers, 2015), or a research environment (the Media Suite) that serves the scholarly needs for working with audiovisual data collections and related mixed-media contextual sources that are maintained at cultural heritage and knowledge institutions. This paper discusses the rationale and challenges behind the development of the Media Suite.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that digital content and infrastructures are increasingly essential, at a time when routine business and commercial frameworks have been disrupted or permanently destroyed, particularly in the cultural and heritage sectors (Arts Council 2020;Bakhshi 2020; Creative Scotland 2020). Yet it has also been a time of digital opportunity for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums: when digital representations of culture and heritage is all that is accessible, digitised versions of artefacts and objects have shown both how essential digitisation now is, and the versatility of digitisation. Cultural Heritage is important for wellbeing(Power and Smyth 2016), and although many institutions worldwide had to restrict physical access, 86% of museums increased their online presence and/or the amount of content they were placing online (ArtFund 2020), online searches for aggregated cultural content “quadrupled” (Gaskin 2020), with emerging opportunities regarding the reframing of digitised content as anessential part of cultural memory (Kahn 2020).

CLARIN stands for “Common Language Resources and TechnologyInfrastructure”. In 2012 CLARIN ERIC was established as a legal entity with themission to create and maintain a digital infrastructure to support the sharing,use, and sustainability of language data (in written, spoken, or multimodal form)available through repositories from all over Europe, in support of research inthe humanities and social sciences and beyond. Since 2016 CLARIN has had thestatus of Landmark research infrastructure and currently it provides easy andsustainable access to digital language data and also offers advanced tools todiscover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse, or combine such datasets, wherever they are located. This is enabled through a networked federation of centres:language data repositories, service centres, and knowledge centres with singlesign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participatingcountries. In addition, CLARIN offers open access facilities for other interestedcommunities of use, both inside and outside of academia. Tools and data fromdifferent centres are interoperable, so that data collections can be combined andtools from different sources can be chained to perform operations at differentlevels of complexity. The strategic agenda adopted by CLARIN and the activities undertaken are rooted in a strong commitment to the Open Science paradigm andthe FAIR data principles. This also enables CLARIN to express its added value forthe European Research Area and to act as a key driver of innovation and contributor to the increasing number of industry programmes running on data-drivenprocesses and the digitalization of society at large.

Despite the proliferation of digital humanities projects, varying greatly in form and media, there remain anxieties about the evaluation of digital work. Digital humanists find, time and time again, that they are expected to perform twice the labour of traditional scholars; once for the work itself and once again for its evaluation. At the same time, traditional humanists often experience a sensation of threat from the digital arena, believing that it is easy to gain employment, grants, and tenure if one is a digital humanist.\ud \ud In this chapter, I ask how we can understand a double logic in which digital-humanities work is at once so powerful as to crowd out the traditional humanists while at the same time so poorly understood as to need supplementation by traditional publication. Classifying the existing mechanisms of evaluation into a three-fold typology of 1.) a desired scarcity correlation; 2.) a set of media-specific denoting frames; and 3.) a set of disciplinary understandings, I show how and why DH remains radical in its work yet traditional in its outputs.

One of the funded project proposals under DARIAH’s Open Humanities call 2015 was “Open History: Sustainable digital publishing of archival catalogues of twentieth-century history archives”. Based on the experiences of the Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the main goal of the “Open History” project was to enhance the dialogue between (meta-)data providers and research infrastructures. Integrating archival descriptions – when they were already available – held at a wide variety of twentieth-century history archives (from classic archives to memorial sites, libraries and private archives) into research infrastructures has proven to be a major challenge, which could not be done without some degree of limited to extensive pre-processing or other preparatory work. The “Open History” project organized two workshops and developed two tools: an easily accessible and general article on why the practice of standardization and sharing is important and how this can be achieved; and a model which provides checklists for self-analyses of archival institutions. The text that follows is the article we have developed. It intentionally remains at a general level, without much jargon, so that it can be easily read by those who are non-archivists or non-IT. Hence, we hope it will be easy to understand for both those who are describing the sources at various archives (with or without IT or archival sciences degrees), as well as decision-makers (directors and advisory boards) who wish to understand the benefits of investing in standardization and sharing of data. It is important to note is that this text is a first step, not a static, final result. Not all aspects about standardization and publication of (meta-)data are discussed, nor are updates or feedback mechanisms for annotations and comments discussed. The idea is that this text can be used in full or in part and that it will include further chapters and section updates as time goes by and as other communities begin using it. Some archives will read through much of these and see confirmation of what they have already been implementing; others – especially the smaller institutions, such as private memory institutions – will find this a low-key and hands-on introduction to help them in their efforts. International audience