NFDI4Culture Consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage

Digital data on tangible and intangible cultural assets is an essential part of daily life, communication and experience. It has a lasting influence on the perception of cultural identity as well as on the interactions between research, the cultural economy and society. Throughout the last three decades, many cultural heritage institutions have contributed a wealth of digital representations of cultural assets (2D digital reproductions of paintings, sheet music, 3D digital models of sculptures, monuments, rooms, buildings), audio-visual data (music, film, stage performances), and procedural research data such as encoding and annotation formats. The long-term preservation and FAIR availability of research data from the cultural heritage domain is fundamentally important, not only for future academic success in the humanities but also for the cultural identity of individuals and society as a whole. Up to now, no coordinated effort for professional research data management on a national level exists in Germany. NFDI4Culture aims to fill this gap and create a user-centered, research-driven infrastructure that will cover a broad range of research domains from musicology, art history and architecture to performance, theatre, film, and media studies.
 The research landscape addressed by the consortium is characterized by strong institutional differentiation. Research units in the consortium's community of interest comprise university institutes, art colleges, academies, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This diverse landscape is also characterized by an abundance of research objects, methodologies and a great potential for data-driven research. In a unique effort carried out by the applicant and co-applicants of this proposal and ten academic societies, this community is interconnected for the first time through a federated approach that is ideally suited to the needs of the participating researchers. To promote collaboration within the NFDI, to share knowledge and technology and to provide extensive support for its users have been the guiding principles of the consortium from the beginning and will be at the heart of all workflows and decision-making processes. Thanks to these principles, NFDI4Culture has gathered strong support ranging from individual researchers to high-level cultural heritage organizations such as the UNESCO, the International Council of Museums, the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia. On this basis, NFDI4Culture will take innovative measures that promote a cultural change towards a more reflective and sustainable handling of research data and at the same time boost qualification and professionalization in data-driven research in the domain of cultural heritage. This will create a long-lasting impact on science, cultural economy and society as a whole.

We are greatly encouraged by the progress at the overarching NFDI level, particularly valuing its collaborative, transdisciplinary, and community-led spirit.We see the NFDI association as a vital structure for the future long-term provision of mature services.NFDI4Culture

Spokesperson
tangible and intangible cultural assets have become an essential part of daily life, communication, and individual as well as societal experience.Consequently, they exert a lasting influence on perceptions of cultural identity and on interactions between research, the cultural economy, and society.Valuable cultural data are generated in creative and performative contexts, in both public and private settings.Participatory access to culture and knowledge, critical analysis, reflection on societal developments, and the preservation of cultural artefacts are today only possible based on digital data and consequently, have become integral to scientific practice.The profound effects of the Corona pandemic have underscored the relevance of FAIR access to digital culture and associated cultural data.Irreplaceable losses of millennia-old cultural assets through wars or environmental disasters highlight the importance of long-term digital preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.Prior to 2018 and the NFDI4Culture initiative, there was no coordinated effort for professional research data management in the field of material and immaterial cultural heritage on a national level.Today, three years after the launch of NFDI4Culture in 2020, a stable consortial network with trusted processes and needs-oriented services has been established.It extends across more than 100 partners in five European countries and has over 300 community members who collaborate in the consortium.
members are active in all five sections and participate in all three governance bodies of the NFDI Association.We consider sustainable basic services tailored to the needs of all NFDI communities as particularly important.With this motivation, we co-initiated the statement of the Consortia Assembly on basic services and subsequently made significant contributions to the successful Base4NFDI proposal.Within the NFDI, we have a high number of transdisciplinary collaborations ranging from the humanities and social sciences to life sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.Together with NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Objects and Text+, we have contributed to a framework of inward-outward cooperation -one of the key objectives of the NFDI as laid out by the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RFII) -that previously did not exist in the humanities and cultural studies in Germany.Nonetheless, we are only at the beginning of a process towards cultural change in the management of research data.In the coming years, further stakeholders must be integrated, awareness of the importance of RDM for safeguarding digital cultural heritage must be widely disseminated, and the established services of NFDI4Culture must be further consolidated.In the coming two years, we will focus on developing sustainable operating models for service providers and will also work on empowering data producers, data curators and data consumers in close collaboration with the data competence centres funded by BMBF as well as partners from the emerging Datenraum Kultur funded by BKM.Internationally, our services will be further integrated into European research infrastructures, while continuously expanding our user base ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8373-4055

Portal, the Registry for Research Tools and Data Services, and the Culture Knowledge Graph, to guidelines, reports, link recommendations and Open Educational Resources. Altogether
Together with our partners and communities, we have established a broad spectrum of cross-institutional services (https://nfdi4culture.de/go/services),ranging from needs-oriented consultancy provided by the Culture Helpdesk, to sustainable storage solutions for data in curated repositories, the comprehensive integration of data portals, software tools, and information services in our Information , members of NFDI4Culture have produced 347 outputs to

164 research projects have engaged
with the consortium and we have issued 46 individualised letters of intent to project page 5 of 11 proposals in 15 research fields.Together with community members we have compiled illustrative success stories which provide testimonials and concrete examples about the consortium's work(https://nfdi4culture.de/go/success-stories).Our Culture Community Reports describe our yearly progress in detail for all participating communities, our partners from the NFDI, and the interested wider public (Community Report 2021, PID https://nfdi4culture.de/go/E3782; Community Report 2022, PID https://nfdi4culture.de/go/E3790).