Library

Description: Ensuring the long-term availability of research data forms an integral part of data management services. Where OAIS compliant digital preservation has been established in recent years, in almost all cases the services aim at the preservation of file-based objects. In the Digital Humanities, research data is often represented in highly structured aggregations, such as Scholarly Digital Editions. Naturally, scholars would like their editions to remain functionally complete as long as possible. Besides standard components like webservers, the presentation typically relies on project specific code interacting with client software like webbrowsers. Especially the latter being subject to rapid change over time invariably makes such environments awkward to maintain once funding has ended. Pragmatic approaches have to be found in order to balance the curation effort and the maintainability of access to research data over time. A sketch of four potential service levels aiming at the long-term availability of research data in the humanities is outlined: (1) Continuous Maintenance, (2) Application Conservation, (3) Application Data Preservation, and (4) Bitstream Preservation. The first being too costly and the last hardly satisfactory in general, we suggest that the implementation of services by an infrastructure provider should concentrate on service levels 2 and 3. We explain their strengths and limitations considering the example of two Scholarly Digital Editions.

Description: This is the documentation on current results of a research project jointly conducted by Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (SDK) and Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB). In this project, we are working on a practical yet sustainable archiving solution for audiovisual material. In the course of the project two major obstacles were identified: 1) Metadata is collected according to standards established in the community but lacking a prescribed serialisation format. 2) Storage size of audiovisual material and time scales of production processes make it often impractical to defer submission for archival storage until all components have arrived and can be processed in one go.

Description: This publication comprises the Software Management Plan (SMP) developed in the HPO-Navi project. The project was funded in the Literature and Information System (LIS) track of the DFG with the aim of increasing the maturity level of scientific software under development, developing improved measures for the quality assurance of this software and for long-term availability. The Ubiquity Generator Framework (UG) software developed in the project provides a software infrastructure to make existing sequential implementations HPC-capable. The UG framework is of interest to developers of specialized optimization algorithms and can be used directly to solve specific problem classes in the field of scientific computing. Due to the naturally high software technology hurdles on HPC systems, UG was initially a highly specialized tool and could only be used to a limited extent without the involvement of the main developer. The central challenge of the project was to create a mechanism for the sustainable development and permanent provision and archiving of the research software. The aim was for UG to achieve the status of a "software product" with implementation of the following project content: - Documentation of the software: a description of the API and the simple connection of further basic solvers, installation instructions for various target platforms and a description of the structure and documentation of the source code as a basis for the distributed sustainable development of UG. - Development of missing user functions of UG: increased platform independence for shared memory parallelization and better logging function for the analysis and verification of results. - Development of a sample data management plan for future research projects that want to use UG and document their research results according to DFG standards for good scientific practice. - Quality assurance: by defining code guidelines, uniform concepts and criteria for the qualitative evaluation of new functions and implementing standards for code review and processes for continuous integration. A complementary goal was to improve the provision, accessibility and long-term reusability of the research software. - Use of an open Git server as a distributed development platform, provision of a download server for releases and sustainable storage of the software code and the associated meta-information. - Improved presentation and visibility through publication in publicly accessible repositories. This includes the prototypical extension of the OPUS 4 repository software widely used in Germany as a means of publishing software with a landing page that can be resolved via a DOI, and improved linking and presentation of UG in swMATH. - Digital long-term archiving: experimental inclusion of software code in an OAIS-compliant digital archiving system and evaluation of the approach in the areas of digital archiving and research data management.