Abstract The paper discusses European research infrastructures in the humanities from a DARIAH-DE perspective, addressing complexity and fragmentation. It provides guidance on navigating the landscape and proposes a sustainable solution: consolidating core services, while at the same time promoting disciplinary infrastructures. Funding as well as institutional commitment needs to ensure long-term responsibility, governance, and accountability for a cohesive research environment.

The sustainability of digital research infrastructures (RIs) beyond project-based funding cycles poses significant structural and economic challenges for memory institutions. In particular, the asymmetry between locally incurred operating costs and globally distributed utility (local costs, global benefits) often leads to a legitimacy deficit within hosting institutions and fosters the emergence of funding graveyards. This article introduces the Association for Research Infrastructures in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (GKFI). The legal form of a registered association (eingetragener Verein) enables the transition from individual institutional responsibility to a collective framework, distributing the burden of infrastructure provision and maintenance. Using the GKFI as a case study, we demonstrate how a curated service catalogue, the coordination of national nodes for European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), and binding governance contribute to the stability of the research landscape (even without a financial budget). The association functions not as a replacement for project-based innovation, but as a complementary anchor of stability, ensuring the long-term availability of scholarly services independent of rigid funding durations. Thus, the GKFI serves as a blueprint for the sustainable provision of digital common goods in the humanities and cultural studies.

The GEOROC database is a leading, open-access source of geochemical and isotopic datasets that provides access to curated compilations of igneous and metamorphic rock and mineral compositions from >20,600 publications. It is a data resource that supports and facilitates hundreds of new research publications each year across multiple geoscientific and related disciplines.This presentation is to “advertise” to the geochemical community this data product and our ongoing efforts to improve the service by providing FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) geochemical data. We will also describe some recently published research where authors were using large geochemical data compilations such as GEOROC and PetDB for innovative approaches in digital geochemistry.To further support such research also in the future, the Digital Geochemical Data Infrastructure (DIGIS) initiative is developing a new IT and data infrastructure for GEOROC 2.0 to enable modern solutions to data submission, discovery and access. GEOROC data compilations are made accessible via a web search interface and an API. In addition, DIGIS maintains a direct data pipeline between the data compiled in GEOROC and the EarthChem Portal. Hence, GEOROC represents one of six different geochemical databases that can be queried and accessed synchronously within the EarthChem Portal. The DIGIS infrastructure further partners with GFZ Data Services, a domain repository for geosciences data, hosted at GFZ, offering data publication services with assigned digital object identifiers (DOI). Individual researchers can directly submit their geochemical datasets to the repository (using the EarthChem Data Templates) where they are archived for the long term. Regular thematic snapshots of the GEOROC synthesis database are archived in the GRO.data repository of the University of Göttingen.Part of this cooperation is the development of standardised vocabularies and data reporting to enhance interoperability of geo- and cosmochemical data systems. Harmonized data entry for the GEOROC, PetDB and Astromat synthesis databases will avoid duplication and ensure consistent data and metadata. With these efforts, and as a participant of the OneGeochemistry(1,2) initiative, DIGIS is working towards the goal of globally harmonised geochemical data to enable interdisciplinary, data-driven research. ReferencesKlöcking, M. et al. (2023). Community recommendations for geochemical data, services and analytical capabilities in the 21st century. In Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (Vol. 351, pp. 192–205).Prent, A. et al. (2023) Innovating and Networking Global Geochemical Data Resources Through OneGeochemistry. Elements 19, Issue 3, pp. 136–137.

Zusammenfassung Wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken messen sich in der digitalen Welt mit einer Vielzahl von und auch global agierenden Informationsinfrastrukturen. Die mit der Digitalisierung einhergehenden neuen Nutzungswege und Anforderungen bringen eine umfassende Weiterentwicklung ihrer Aufgaben und Angebote mit sich. Als Infrastruktur- und Innovationspartnerinnen nehmen Bibliotheken dabei eine wichtige Rolle in der Nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) ein.

Informationswissenschaftliche Projekte sind essentielle Bestandteile der digitalen Transformation wissenschaftlicher Bibliotheken. Durch den Aufbau neuer Infrastrukturbereiche werden klassische bibliothekarische Aufgaben und Kompetenzen um digitale Angebote und Methoden ergänzt. Die erfolgreiche Durchführung und nachhaltige Einbindung solcher Projekte, verlangt nach spezifischen Kompetenzen und Strukturen. In diesem Kapitel werden wir auf die allgemeinen Herausforderungen anhand digitaler Editionsprojekte und auf praktische Beispiele bei der Projektfinanzierung, Projektrealisierung und den organisatorischen Rahmenbedingen eingehen.

The GEOROC database is a leading, open-access source of geochemical and isotopic datasets of igneous and metamorphic rocks and minerals. It was established 24 years ago and currently provides access to curated compilations of rock and mineral compositions from >20,600 publications (>32 million single data values). The Digital Geochemical Data Infrastructure (DIGIS) initiative for GEOROC 2.0 is now building a connected platform capable of supporting the diverse demands of digital, data-based geochemical research: including modern solutions to data submission, discovery and access.One of the challenges for maintaining a high quality, up-to-date database such as GEOROC is consistent data entry. Historically, data were compiled manually from the academic literature by trained curators. This manual data entry process is slow, resource-intensive and prone to errors. Exacerbated by the lack of best-practices or standards for analytical geochemical data reporting, the quality and completeness of data and metadata compiled in this way are highly variable. A possible solution to this challenge is offered by domain-specific repositories: in part driven by demands of some funders and publishers to make all research data publicly available, data producers increasingly publish their research datasets, affording repositories a unique opportunity to impose consistent standards and quality. Following these developments, DIGIS established a domain repository with DOI minting capabilities in 2021 to support independent data submission by authors. In principle, these data submissions may comprise new analytical results as well as compilations of previously published data (“expert datasets”). DIGIS also uses its repository for versioning of the GEOROC data compilations and to provide distinct, citable objects to the researchers that use GEOROC compilations for their work (so-called “precompiled files”, a collection of pre-formatted results of the most popular search queries to the GEOROC database are regularly updated and re-published). However, whilst all data submissions by authors are required to fulfill the scope of the GEOROC database, new analytical data need to meet additional quality requirements: the repository enforces a strict template to ensure consistent reporting of all relevant sample and method/analysis metadata. These templates can then be automatically harvested from the repository directly into the GEOROC database, with the added guarantee that new data entries are a) approved by the owners of the datasets, and b) follow a consistent data reporting and quality standard.To encourage user uptake of both the repository and the compilations available in the GEOROC database, DIGIS is working closely with IEDA2 and EarthChem towards developing a common infrastructure for geochemical data. One goal of this collaboration is a single repository submission platform that asserts the same requirements for data and metadata quality of submitted datasets. In addition, DIGIS has also partnered with GFZ Data Services as their trusted domain repository. Finally, through the OneGeochemistry initiative, all three partners are working towards global community-endorsed best practices for geochemical data publication. Ultimately, these efforts will facilitate greater interoperability between globally distributed geochemical data systems, enabling more user-friendly delivery of data publication and compilation services to the research community.

ZusammenfassungDurch die Zunahme an digitalen Forschungsmethoden in den Geisteswissenschaften nimmt auch die Nachfrage nach Diensten zum Forschungsdatenmanagement rasant zu. Wir beschreiben die sich daraus ergebenden Herausforderungen und Perspektiven eines geisteswissenschaftlichen Datenzentrums zur nachhaltigen Sicherung und Bereitstellung digitaler Forschung am Beispiel des Humanities Data Centres.

Complex software environments, like virtual research environments or visualisation frameworks, are increasingly used to conduct research and present its results. While there is a growing amount for solutions facilitating the (granular) citation of publications and research data, the citation of complex software environments remains a challenge. This abstract outlines the challenges and introduces an approach for referencing software environments developed in the Humanities Data Centre project: the application preservation.

Digital methods and collaborative research in virtual research environments are gaining in importance for the arts and humanities. The EU-funded project DARIAH aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across these disciplines. The most basic but nevertheless fundamental task of DARIAH is to provide sustainable storage for research data. Information contained in data like images, texts or music needs to be secured and to remain accessible even if the original information carrier becomes lost or corrupted. The heterogeneity of the humanistic data and the need for distributed, perform ant access are the main challenges in designing an archiving system for the arts and humanities. Using the "Virtual Scriptorium", a digitisation project in Trier, Germany, this paper exemplary identifies the humanistic researchers' storage needs and derives requirements for an infrastructure. As a solution, a generic architecture for a federated data zone based on the iRODS technologies is proposed. The system implemented in Trier and Karlsruhe is described and will be extended to other locations as the researchers benefit from the initial set-up.