Library

Description: Cultural heritage institutions are on the verge of making their artefacts available in digital form. During this transition they are faced with conceptual and technical challenges that have only little overlap with their traditional domains but provide them with a lot of opportunities. We aim at empowering them to deal with some of these challenges by designing workflows attached to the data flow within a digital long-term preservation system. The preservation framework processes data by utilising micro-services. These are tailored to accommodate data transformations that can help institutions making their data available if they choose to participate in the interconnected digital world

Description: Research software has become a central asset in academic research. It optimizes existing and enables new research methods, implements and embeds research knowledge, and constitutes an essential research product in itself. Research software must be sustainable in order to understand, replicate, reproduce, and build upon existing research or conduct new research effectively. In other words, software must be available, discoverable, usable, and adaptable to new needs, both now and in the future. Research software therefore requires an environment that supports sustainability. Hence, a change is needed in the way research software development and maintenance are currently motivated, incentivized, funded, structurally and infrastructurally supported, and legally treated. Failing to do so will threaten the quality and validity of research. In this paper, we identify challenges for research software sustainability in Germany and beyond, in terms of motivation, selection, research software engineering personnel, funding, infrastructure, and legal aspects. Besides researchers, we specifically address political and academic decision-makers to increase awareness of the importance and needs of sustainable research software practices. In particular, we recommend strategies and measures to create an environment for sustainable research software, with the ultimate goal to ensure that software-driven research is valid, reproducible and sustainable, and that software is recognized as a first class citizen in research. This paper is the outcome of two workshops run in Germany in 2019, at deRSE19 - the first International Conference of Research Software Engineers in Germany - and a dedicated DFG-supported follow-up workshop in Berlin.

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 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.