Final Report Summary - CENDARI (Collaborative EuropeaN Digital/Archival Infrastructure)
Executive Summary:
Why Build CENDARI? Introduction to CENDARI by Dr Jennifer Edmond, Project Coordinator.
As Humanities scholars, we love our libraries and archives. However, while they are our richest resources, they are also our limitation. The physical locations of analogue records, and the requirement to reorganise them in a standardised way, determines to some extent what kind of research questions can be asked and answered by individual scholars. And what if our questions are not bounded to an individual, or discrete event or even a single country?
Much historical research, and humanities research generally, is characterised by a process known as chaining – iterative drawing of conclusions verified by the evidence discovered at the next logical step. The knowledge creations process of historical research is powerful, but cycling through a corpus of heterogeneous historical data takes time and that time increases exponentially if the records are located in different countries, written in different languages, scattered by conflict and shifting political borders over hundreds of years. Moreover, archival records are often flawed and utterly unscientific in the complicated human motivations that created them.
Historical research is not something merely entertaining and nice to have; it is something we need as citizens and neighbours in a connected world.
We need up-to-date historical research to drive forward our health and wealth, just as we need up-to-date medical and materials research. But being ‘up-to-date’ has a slightly different meaning for history than it does for the sciences. Because, while evidence base history uses may take in hundreds of years of data, “History” will always be written from the interpretative perspective of the current cultural moment. Technology is a part of that moment for who we are today and the collective identities today’s historians need to connect with, in order to be understood.
Therefore, the potential for an infrastructure that integrates archival resources for historical research was enormous, to enable subtle connections to be explored between distant events and macro-level trends. We call this approach data mining and it power is widely recognised and has begun to be exploited. But to date, technologies have only been able to address small pieces of the research task, meaning a scholar looking to use all the tools available has to constantly switch platforms, standards and organisational structures.
This inefficiency was the inspiration for CENDARI (the Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) and we are thrilled to open up this powerful new toolkit for historians everywhere.
Project Context and Objectives:
The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archive Infrastructure (CENDARI) was established in order to provide and facilitate access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history through the development of a virtual ‘enquiry environment’. The project was funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research.
The collaborative research project, which was led by Trinity College Dublin, and had an active period of four years from February 2012 to January 2016, created a robust and fit-to-purpose Research Infrastructure which integrates digital archives for medieval and modern European history and is available at www.cendari.eu. The project consortium, comprised of 14 institutions from across Europe, leveraged analogue networks and practices as well as existing collections of digital finding aids and created a pilot research environment infrastructure that is easy to use/access and responsive to researcher requirements.
The principal objectives for the CENDARI Project Consortium were, as follows:
• To raise awareness of CENDARI throughout the historical research communities within the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War so as to guarantee a thorough understanding of existing research methodologies and processes which were incorporated into the development of the CENDARI “enquiry environment”
• To raise awareness of CENDARI throughout the community of content holders for the two pilot areas and to investigate and discover the level of relevant materials for high level reflection in the CENDARI Archive Directory. One of the key aims of CENDARI was to integrate existing digital archives and resources into the CENDARI Enquiry Environment by working with existing research infrastructures and resource holder in Europe.
• To thoroughly investigate and assess the cutting-edge computational techniques (e.g. data-mining, visualisation, annotation, shared research environments, multilingual access to digital assets) relevant to the domain of historical research. On this basis, CENDARI established an appropriate technical platform for digital archival research, from the underlying ontologies through the registry/repository layer to the user interface search and interrogation tools.
• To plan, promote and administer a successful Transnational Access programme to provide researchers with fellowships, funded by CENDARI, allowing them to work at a number of the infrastructures participating in CENDARI.
• To ensure end-to-end integration, honing and testing of the technical infrastructure (including access control, workflow deployment, service compatibility, user experience etc.)
• To work closely with DARIAH throughout the project period in order to pilot best practice for sustainability planning for EU projects, and to ensure the appropriate sustainability of CENDARI’s own outputs, including:
▪ Data
▪ Tools
▪ Knowledge
▪ The Research Infrastructure/Portal
▪ Knowledge and intangibles
• To test the infrastructure components as they were developed as well as the entire end-to-end experience with a Trusted Users Group.
• To develop a CENDARI Sustainability Plan in order to promote long-term sustainability of the CENDARI outputs and community beyond the end of the project.
The resulting CENDARI environment, which was handed over to the DARIAH ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) at the end of the project period, is a powerful new platform for accessing and investigating historical data in a transnational fashion overcoming the national and institutional data silos that exist within the European Research Area. The CENDARI environment has created new ways to discover meaning, a methodology not just of scale but of kind. It has created and drawn together tools and workspaces that allow researchers to engage with large data sets via federated multilingual searches across heterogeneous resources while defining workflows to enable the creation of personalized research environments, shared research and teaching spaces, and annotation trails, amongst other features.
Project Results:
The work performed since the beginning of the CENDARI project has largely been aligned with one or more of the following project features: Project Structure, Archival Directory, Archival Research Guides, Data Integration, CENDARI Enquiry Environment, Archival Research Practices and Transnational Access Programme.
Archival Directory
Throughout the project, the CENDARI project team has worked on the establishment of an Archival Directory through the identification, description and cataloguing of archival holdings and other collections of value for research within the two project pilot areas – World War I and Medieval European Culture. Alongside manually establishing archival descriptions relevant for the Archival Research Guides, members of the WP5 team contacted a broad range of Cultural Heritage Institutions in order to receive data from them to be ingested into the CENDARI repository. A total of 168 Cultural Heritage Institutions were contacted and the final CENDARI Archive Directory contained approximately 830,000 datasets available for users.
By the end of the project, the number of archival descriptions established manually by the team was 3,107 (2,320 for the modern period and 787 for the medieval period) and the number of cultural heritage institutions described in the Archival Directory was 1,251. An overview of the approximately 830,000 datasets harvested by CENDARI and the providers of that data is included below.
Dataspace (Provider) Format Total Format Total Provider
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
(JDC Archives) EAD 2 2
Archives Hub EAD 1189 1189
Bundesarchiv EAD 25384 25384
CENDARI Archival Descriptions EAG 1315
EAD 3996 5311
CENDARI Ontologies docx 1
Rdf 12
xml 1 14
Europeana EDM 287182 287182
Kalliope DC 44347
MODS 44347
EAD 988 89682
The European Library & Europeana
- Newspapers Project EDM 198883
LOD 198883 397766
Ajalooarhiiv EAD 5253 5253
Riigiarhiiv EAD 4895 4895
Tallinna Linnarahiiv EAD 1207 1207
Ottoman Archives PDF over 3000 descriptions
in 211 PDF files 211
Czech Department of Archives Administration EAD 2050 2050
Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen EAD 970 970
Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg EAD 36 36
Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv EAD 35 35
University Library Heidelberg METS 2627 2627
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam EAD 4547 4547
Total number of resources ingested until official end of the project 828369
The Archival Directory can be regarded as a “work in progress”, since researchers and archivists using the CENDARI Archive Directory can find relevant material in collections and archives not yet contained in the Archival Directory and describe it over there to the benefit of all future users
Archival Research Guides
The Archival Research Guides (ARGs) were a significant output of CENDARI. They illustrated paradigmatic approaches to the subjects under question from a transnational, comparative perspective, took into account a trans-medial combination of sources, and provided complementary material of different administrative level creators that is being stored in different archives. The ARGs pertinent to World War I covered almost all current research questions related to the First World War Studies from a transnational perspective, and focused on Eastern Europe as the main objective of CENDARI. The medieval ARGs focused on topics selected as relevant for medieval studies and culture, and introduced important historical sources like manuscripts, a lot of them available digitally.
The Archival Research Guides take up cross-sectional issues, lead the CENDARI user through the wealth of sources available in the Archival Directory and present in a prototypical form the transnational and comparative approach favoured by the CENDARI project.
The Archival Research Guides are intended to act as the connective tissues across archival collections with rich and contextualized information and to guide users to different contents as well as to the application of the tools and services available within the Virtual Research Environment (VRE), thus exemplifying the enhancement of the traditional methods of historical research produced by the project.
The Archival Research Guides facilitate the retrieval of collections and complement the descriptions of the holdings within the CENDARI Archive Directory, by providing historiographical context and methodological support to researchers. They allow for a virtual composition and access to comparable holdings across national and institutional borders, bestowing information on dispersed, relocated material belonging to the same historical context. They cover broad thematic areas of historical research and serve also as examples for user-generated annotations, which may also be further developed in a guide format.
The topics of the CENDARI Archival Research Guides have been selected according to criteria in order to have them being written from a transnational, comparative perspective, taking into account a transmedial combination of sources, and at the same time providing complementary material compiled by creators from different administrative levels and stored in different archives. The Archival Research Guides focus on historical concepts, events or developments and enclose recent historiographical subjects. Special emphasis has been laid on the unexplored, smaller archives across Europe and particularly Eastern and South East Europe. The chosen topics do not claim completeness, as they are perceived as paradigmatic and exemplary collections of information to be enriched and complemented by researchers.
The CENDARI Archival Research Guides cover almost all current research questions relevant for First World War studies, focusing on Eastern Europe as the main objective of the project. The authors of the Archival Research Guides have not only contributed to topics related to their major fields of expertise, but researched also on new ones, which are of interest for the academic community and related to the First World War. The medieval Archival Research Guides focus on topics selected as relevant for medieval studies and culture during the Participatory Design meeting held in Florence on 25 January 2013, organised by FEF, SISMEL and INRI, the COST – CENDARI Summer School, held in Florence in July 2013, and the seminar “Medieval Scholarly Research and the Digital Ecosystem” (Florence, March 20-22, 2014) organized by Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, COST and CENDARI.
16 Archival Research Guides have been provided for modern history, i.e. on the First World War, 9 for medieval history, i.e. on Medieval Culture.
The following list of the CENDARI Archival Research Guides introduces the topics according to their domain, with the names of the lead authors presented in the first position and the collaborators provided in alphabetical order.
First World War:
• Prisoners of War and their Return Home (Pavlina Bobič)
• Coercion and Consent in the Belligerent Armies (Pavlina Bobič)
• Injury and Disease (Pavlina Bobič)
• Workers and Workers’ Movements during the First World War (Jakub Beneš)
• Private Memories of the First World War (Francesca Morselli)
• Women During the First World War (Francesca Morselli, Jörg Lehmann)
• The Fall of the House of Romanov (Anna Bohn)
• National Narratives of the First World War – Memory and Commemoration (Aleksandra Pawliczek)
• Parallel Records and Supplementary Material – Poland (Aleksandra Pawliczek)
• Jews of Eastern Europe in the period 1914–1921 (Andrei Zamoiski)
• Industrial Development during the First World War (Francesca Morselli)
• On the ruins of the Russian Empire: Establishment of New States in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, 1917-1921 (Andrei Zamoiski)
• The Reconstruction of Post-Habsburg East Central Europe, 1918-1921 (Jakub Beneš)
• Islamic Movements in the Russian Empire during and after the First World War (Andrei Zamoiski)
• Science and Technology in the First World War (Jörg Lehmann, Francesca Morselli)
• Methodological Guide on Sources in the Archival Directory AtoM (Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Jörg Lehmann, Francesca Morselli, Lorenza Tromboni, Andrei Zamoiski)
Medieval Culture:
• Italian Books of Poetry (Irene Tani)
• Italian Vernacular Bibles (XIIIth-XVth c.) (Caterina Menichetti)
• Medieval Miscellanies – Homiliaries (Lidia Buono, Eugenia Russo)
• Dominican Lectores in Florence during the 14th century (Lorenza Tromboni)
• Medieval Preaching (Zdeněk Uhlíř, Martin Hlouch)
• Dispersed Medieval Monastic Archives in Florence (18th-19th c.) (Roberta Giacomi, Vinicio Serafini)
• Medieval Collections of Saints Lives (Silvia Nocentini)
• Science in Medieval Central European Sources (Tomáš Klimek, Miroslava Hejnová, Tomislav Kolar)
• Transcribing Medieval Manuscripts and Archival Material (Kathleen Walker-Meikle)
The content of the CENDARI Archival Research Guides does not claim to be exhaustive. Rather they are provided in a way that enables the future users of the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to further enlarge and enrich them. The Guides are perceived as a starting point within the CENDARI Research Infrastructure for research on a given topic and a framework in which to work.
The license applied to the content in the Archival Research Guides is the CC-BY Creative Commons attribution – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ following general rules of scholarly attribution practices. This means that the CC-BY Creative Commons Licence will be applied to the existing content of the Archival Research Guides and all content that users add.
All the Archival Research Guides developed by the CENDARI project can be accessed at:
http://www.cendari.eu/archival-research-guides/
Data Integration
The tools developed within CENDARI are available published on GitHub under open source license. All tools were designed and developed with loose coupling in mind, thus they can be used as single components or integrated with other services of the CENDARI infrastructure. The data integration platform of CENDARI can be extended and integrated with additional indexing and data services and is prepared to accommodate further data formats. The fact that it does not use a complex data integration framework makes it easily adoptable by other projects, with a short learning curve. All data transformations and the log of transformations for each resource are in addition persisted as files on the file system, which makes the infrastructure more attractive for further processing pipelines.
CENDARI delivered functioning infrastructure with strong potential for further extension and reuse, especially due to its open-source orientation and clear separation of data workflows. Despite some components being in beta state (such as the Scraper service or the Multilingual NERD service), they can be used further by the infrastructure, in case they will be deployed to a longer-term stable operating platform.
CENDARI Infrastructure Layer Model
The CENDARI project team consolidated the CENDARI infrastructure in an integrated model. This integrated model, called the CENDARI Infrastructure Layer Model, reached version 1.0 by the project’s closing and can be found as an attachment to this report. The figure shows the final state of CENDARI’s components and how they are connected to each other. This figure served as a guideline for the integration process and provided the developers with an updated view on CENDARI’s infrastructure.
All of the CENDARI tools documentation is available under https://docs.cendari.dariah.eu/index.html. The CENDARI documentation process was closely aligned to the CENDARI development process throughout the project. This approach addressed the nature of current project consortia, which are likely to be distributed across Europe, making collaborative online instruments the obvious choice. The tools used and the publication format as a freely accessible and browsable web page were chosen to allow a constant and smooth updating of the documentation and to improve the usability for the end user but also allowing for adaptation of the structure for other projects or initiatives. This solution was intended as a convenient offer for the user, who can access the documentation directly from within the CENDARI infrastructure or can access it separately.
CENDARI Enquiry Environment
In the centre of CENDARI’s main components resides the Note-Taking Environment (NTE) that functions as the central access point for the user. Within the NTE features can be accessed by the end users that are in fact provided by background components.The online Note Taking Environment (NTE), based on the “EditorsNotes” tool, was further developed and finalised in the final period of the project and the NTE was used as the backbone of the CENDARI Virtual Research Environment for note-taking and faceted search by users. The CENDARI NTE represented a major deviation from the original version of the software since it implemented multiple extensions in terms of services and workflow. It is available on github.com along with all of the other CENDARI developments, see https://github.com/CENDARI/editorsnotes
The CENDARI data ingestion process, as discussed above, allowed documents from multiple formats and sources to be uniformly accessed from the CENDARI environment. The NTE Faceted Search allows searching in these documents, and provides a uniform way for users to access the documents or collect important URLs for their research notes.
Additionally, the whole DBPedia database was indexed and provided in the faceted search; it helps identify entities (people, places, events), as well as facilitating auto-completion when resolving named entities manually.
The original EditorsNotes system was meant to be used on open projects where all the documents and notes are always visible, even if only some users are allowed as editors. This vision of the work of historian was challenged in all our participatory design sessions: historians do not want other historians to look at their notes, unless explicitly collaborating on a specific project. But since CENDARI was a collaborative project, it was agreed with the historians that the significant entities they might add in their notes and documents within the CENDARI infrastructure could become public. Therefore, the public view of their work may reveal that they are working on documents and notes related to a set of persons, places, dates, etc. but not the contents of the text unless they explicitly allow it.
To implement these requirements, the CENDARI team changed the security settings of projects in the NTE and added tools to allow users to share their projects with colleagues so as to collaborate.
The original EditorsNotes had a much simpler user interface since it was not meant to be used for personal research purpose. Historians gather a lot of documents during their documentation work and produce a lot of notes to make sense of their gathered documents. Therefore, the CENDARI infrastructure was developed to provide a user interface that could provide scale in terms of all the documents, notes, and entities. The team enhanced the navigation in order to facilitate cross search and connection between various points of information. The search engine that was initially restricted to documents managed only by EditorsNotes was expanded to show all the documents gathered and indexed in the CENDARI project, offering faceted search and navigation. Users can navigate using either faceted search, through personal or group projects in the NTE, or from the visualisations that show entities related to places and times.
Transnational Access Programme
The CENDARI Transnational Access programme ran throughout the four years of the project and aimed to support and stimulate historical research in the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War by facilitating access to key archives, specialist knowledge and collections in CENDARI host institutions.
The CENDARI project was specifically committed to hosting early career scholars who wished to apply digital humanities methods to their historical enquiry. The fellowships were particularly designed to support researchers from countries without equivalent facilities and early career scholars with limited access to these research infrastructures. The Fellowships were hosted by:
• Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (TCD)
• King’s College London, UK (KCL)
• National Library of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic (NKP)
• Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Göttingen, (GCDH/UGOE)
• Germany University of Stuttgart & Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Germany (USTUTT)
The TNA programme received a total of 68 applications, 57 of which passed the eligibility criteria, and were reviewed by the EEAB and the prospective hosts. A total of 28 fellowships were awarded and 14 female and 14 male early career academics took part in the TNA programme. The fellows came from 18 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom), with a nice spread across Europe (and beyond).
Overall the CENDARI TNA Programme delivered 275 weeks of access to transnational researchers from across Europe. This broke down among the host institutions as follows:
• 22 weeks in the National Library of the Czech Republic
• 42 weeks in University of Stuttgart
• 66 weeks in University of Göttingen
• 78 weeks in Trinity College Dublin
• 67 weeks in King’s College London
Summary details of all TNA fellows and their projects, including their fellowship reports are available on the CENDARI website at http://www.cendari.eu/about-us/transnational-access-fellows.
There were three (groups of) stakeholders in the TNA programme: the CENDARI project, the Fellows and the Hosts. At the end of the programme we may conclude that all stakeholders benefitted from the programme. The project received invaluable input from the fellows, the research projects and future careers of the fellows were given a tangible boost, and the hosts favourably commented on the impetus the programme gave to their staff, not in the least by expanding networks and opening up the opportunity for new collaboration.
Potential Impact:
The CENDARI Impact
The final result delivered by the CENDARI project was an integrated research infrastructure which offers historical researchers a number of services to access and research dispersed digital archival collections within the two pilot areas of the First World War and medieval European culture. The project has delivered a digital research infrastructure that is available to users at www.cendari.eu. The virtual research environment facilitates and enhances digital access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history (at the completion of the project, there were approximately 830,000 datasets available to users). The CENDARI research environment allows users to effectively share knowledge and to collaborate with other users, for the production of world-class research outputs.
CENDARI contributed to the Digital Agenda for Europe by widening the application of technology in historical research and deepening our understanding of how technology can enhance and bring efficiencies to the work of researchers in these fields. The project provided opportunities – through design workshops, testing sessions at the three CENDARI Summer Schools, and feedback from testing sessions with a Trusted Users Group - which allowed historians and collections experts to communicate their real needs in a research infrastructure to the CENDARI technical development team. Through these workshops, historians have been able to identify how technology can bring about innovation in their research practices in terms of computer support, interfaces and the services required. This information was made available for any future infrastructure development projects through the CENDARI deliverables from WP4 – D4.1 Report on Archival Practices and D4.2 Domain Use Cases and from WP8 – D8.1 and D8.2 – Functional Descriptions.
For the archival community, the CENDARI team overcame institutional and national data silos and, particularly for the smaller archives working with CENDARI, increased their exposure to relevant researchers and users. CENDARI’s virtual research environment placed a strong emphasis on not merely enhancing information already visible on-line, but also assisting archives with less well-developed digitisation programmes to find meaningful ways of presenting their collections alongside those of other institutions with similar holdings. “The CENDARI White Book of Archives - Data Exchange Recommendations for Cultural Heritage Institutions and Infrastructure Projects” (Deliverable 9.3) sets out the project’s data exchange recommendations for Cultural Heritage Institutions and Infrastructure Projects based on the lessons learned by the CENDARI project team.
By integrating and enhancing the large variety of data types and sources into a central resource designed with the users, CENDARI will also be able to influence work in other data communities, as a model for digital research infrastructure development relevant not only for historical data, but for other scientific fields. The CENDARI Sustainability Plan (Deliverable 2.4) described the actions that the CENDARI project took, and planned to take, in order to ensure the project’s continued impact after the end of the funded period and it also suggested a model for other, similar initiatives, seeking to plan for and conceptualise their own sustainable futures.
The CENDARI Sustainability Plan (D2.4) was published in January 2016. The development of the Plan involved a comprehensive review of the literature and published experiences of institutions and projects in developing sustainability models for complex digital resources for the arts and humanities. The CENDARI Sustainability Plan sought to build upon the good work done according to these models and to propose a new state of the art of the concept of sustainability for research infrastructures. The Plan described the many facets of what CENDARI created, sought to understand their value for current and future user groups, and made proposals for how to sustain those elements in one or more formats which will best allow them to connect with their users. The Plan presented a "toolkit" for the sustainability of the CENDARI project and its infrastructure, aiming not only to sustain CENDARI and contribute to the DARIAH ERIC’s capacity to advise on sustainable development, but also to support future project teams in thinking about their own projects and their legacies. The Plan presented a concrete response to the hypothesis that a successful approach to sustainability for Research Infrastructures needs to be comprehensive; an approach that doesn’t just consider data or technology, community, communications or processes, but in fact all of them simultaneously.
Beyond the end of the project, a number of CENDARI partners agreed to set up a CENDARI SUSTAIN Working Group within the DARIAH EIRC. The Working Group will support the development of DARIAH by continuing to investigate (in an applied manner) how DARIAH can contribute to the sustainability of research infrastructure projects developed in coordination with it, and how CENDARI can contribute to the realisation of DARIAH.
In addition to CENDARI SUSTAIN, CENDARI’s work also continues in the context of the PARTHENOS Research Infrastructure Cluster project (funded under Horizon 2020 Call INFRA DEV-4-2014; project website is at www.parthenos-project.eu). PARTHENOS brings together CENDARI partners SISMEL, TCD and KCL with representatives of five other research infrastructures and projects (CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH ERIC, ARIADNE, EHRI and IPERION) to share data, technology, knowledge and best practice across the sector. The work of PARTHENOS was launched in May 2015 and will continue through 2019.
CENDARI Dissemination and Exploitation of Results
Throughout the project, the CENDARI team followed a comprehensive communications programme: website, promotional materials, launch events etc. which was successful in making potential CENDARI users aware of its existence. However, the primary aim of the project team was to provide users with a basis for understanding how to apply CENDARI as a tool for archival investigation. This goal will be met by the more in-depth aspects of the CENDARI dissemination programme, in particular the training events, expert seminars, focus groups and other networking events and stakeholder meetings. Each of these elements was intended to create for a different segment of the total user audience for CENDARI a customised delivery to build awareness, trust and investment in the benefits CENDARI provides. The list of various presentations, papers, workshops and seminars at which the CENDARI team engaged with potential users is provided in Table A.2 - List of Dissemination Activities.
The CENDARI website (www.cendari.eu) is the first point of contact for all target user groups. From the beginning of the project, the objective of the website was to present project information, provide information about the project objectives, project funding and the partner institutions. In the first phase of the project, however, the website needed to feature the activity of the project team, whereas the final incarnation needed to be better optimised to deliver access to the functional components of the CENDARI system.
Towards the end of the project, the PMB decided to redesign the project website in order to provide a sustainable, easy to use and attractive online portal for existing and future users to access the infrastructure (the NTE, the ARGs, the CENDARI repository) as well as acting as an archive for the relevant project deliverables, information and reports. A subcontractor was appointed to undertake the revision of the website, both structurally and aesthetically. The new CENDARI website was launched at the CENDARI Project Launch and Final Conference in January 2016, which represents an investment in the future sustainability of the infrastructure and project outputs.
There is an email address for queries to the project (info@CENDARI.eu) which is published on the website and will continue to be administered by the Project Coordinator, TCD in conjunction with the CENDARI Sustain DARIAH Working Group.
The social media presence of CENDARI was established over the lifetime of the project using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for a coordinated and integrated approach. The value of social networks for CENDARI lies in visibility with the target audience of academics, library and archive professionals. The Twitter account (www.twitter.com/CENDARIProject) is extremely useful at live events, such as conferences and the Summer Schools, where use of an appropriate hashtag in conjunction with the project username helps raise awareness of the project and establish virtual conversations with key professionals. The Twitter account continues to be maintained by the Project Coordinator and it will continue to be a useful dissemination resource for the ongoing work of the CENDARI Sustain DARIAH Working Group.
On 14th January 2016, the CENDARI virtual infrastructure and other project results were launched in Berlin at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences & Humanities. It was an occasion to celebrate the achievements of the project and share the lessons learned over the past four years. The full event was live-streamed online via the CENDARI website and over 700 people watched online as CENDARI researchers gave live demonstrations of the research platform, introducing the Note-Taking Environment and the Archival Research Guides to an audience of approximately 80 historians and archivists from cultural heritage institutions at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
In her welcoming remarks, the Project Coordinator Dr Jennifer Edmond, observed “In a globalised Europe, we can no longer afford to treat the evidence of history as belonging only to national silos, but that is still how the archives, libraries and museums of Europe are by and large organised. Through CENDARI historians can approach questions of identity and history transnationally, uncovering shared experiences across borders as well as official narratives contained within them, highlighting also those collections and stories that risk becoming 'hidden' because of how they have been viewed or because they happen to be held in economically less well-off countries.”
Oliver Janz, Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin who coordinated WP5, commented, "The visibility of the holdings and their searchability within a single repository will certainly change the way historians work and support a better planning of travel to archives."
The day concluded with an expert panel contributing to a lively discussion to the final part of the launch, and were happy to take questions via Twitter, proving the truly transnational nature of the project.
List of Websites:
Project Website: www.cendari.eu
Project Email: info@cendari.eu
Project Coordinator: Dr Jennifer Edmond, Director of Strategic Projects for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Email: edmondj@tcd.ie
Project Officer: Ms. Deirdre Byrne, Project Officer, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Email: byrned36@tcd.ie
Why Build CENDARI? Introduction to CENDARI by Dr Jennifer Edmond, Project Coordinator.
As Humanities scholars, we love our libraries and archives. However, while they are our richest resources, they are also our limitation. The physical locations of analogue records, and the requirement to reorganise them in a standardised way, determines to some extent what kind of research questions can be asked and answered by individual scholars. And what if our questions are not bounded to an individual, or discrete event or even a single country?
Much historical research, and humanities research generally, is characterised by a process known as chaining – iterative drawing of conclusions verified by the evidence discovered at the next logical step. The knowledge creations process of historical research is powerful, but cycling through a corpus of heterogeneous historical data takes time and that time increases exponentially if the records are located in different countries, written in different languages, scattered by conflict and shifting political borders over hundreds of years. Moreover, archival records are often flawed and utterly unscientific in the complicated human motivations that created them.
Historical research is not something merely entertaining and nice to have; it is something we need as citizens and neighbours in a connected world.
We need up-to-date historical research to drive forward our health and wealth, just as we need up-to-date medical and materials research. But being ‘up-to-date’ has a slightly different meaning for history than it does for the sciences. Because, while evidence base history uses may take in hundreds of years of data, “History” will always be written from the interpretative perspective of the current cultural moment. Technology is a part of that moment for who we are today and the collective identities today’s historians need to connect with, in order to be understood.
Therefore, the potential for an infrastructure that integrates archival resources for historical research was enormous, to enable subtle connections to be explored between distant events and macro-level trends. We call this approach data mining and it power is widely recognised and has begun to be exploited. But to date, technologies have only been able to address small pieces of the research task, meaning a scholar looking to use all the tools available has to constantly switch platforms, standards and organisational structures.
This inefficiency was the inspiration for CENDARI (the Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) and we are thrilled to open up this powerful new toolkit for historians everywhere.
Project Context and Objectives:
The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archive Infrastructure (CENDARI) was established in order to provide and facilitate access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history through the development of a virtual ‘enquiry environment’. The project was funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research.
The collaborative research project, which was led by Trinity College Dublin, and had an active period of four years from February 2012 to January 2016, created a robust and fit-to-purpose Research Infrastructure which integrates digital archives for medieval and modern European history and is available at www.cendari.eu. The project consortium, comprised of 14 institutions from across Europe, leveraged analogue networks and practices as well as existing collections of digital finding aids and created a pilot research environment infrastructure that is easy to use/access and responsive to researcher requirements.
The principal objectives for the CENDARI Project Consortium were, as follows:
• To raise awareness of CENDARI throughout the historical research communities within the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War so as to guarantee a thorough understanding of existing research methodologies and processes which were incorporated into the development of the CENDARI “enquiry environment”
• To raise awareness of CENDARI throughout the community of content holders for the two pilot areas and to investigate and discover the level of relevant materials for high level reflection in the CENDARI Archive Directory. One of the key aims of CENDARI was to integrate existing digital archives and resources into the CENDARI Enquiry Environment by working with existing research infrastructures and resource holder in Europe.
• To thoroughly investigate and assess the cutting-edge computational techniques (e.g. data-mining, visualisation, annotation, shared research environments, multilingual access to digital assets) relevant to the domain of historical research. On this basis, CENDARI established an appropriate technical platform for digital archival research, from the underlying ontologies through the registry/repository layer to the user interface search and interrogation tools.
• To plan, promote and administer a successful Transnational Access programme to provide researchers with fellowships, funded by CENDARI, allowing them to work at a number of the infrastructures participating in CENDARI.
• To ensure end-to-end integration, honing and testing of the technical infrastructure (including access control, workflow deployment, service compatibility, user experience etc.)
• To work closely with DARIAH throughout the project period in order to pilot best practice for sustainability planning for EU projects, and to ensure the appropriate sustainability of CENDARI’s own outputs, including:
▪ Data
▪ Tools
▪ Knowledge
▪ The Research Infrastructure/Portal
▪ Knowledge and intangibles
• To test the infrastructure components as they were developed as well as the entire end-to-end experience with a Trusted Users Group.
• To develop a CENDARI Sustainability Plan in order to promote long-term sustainability of the CENDARI outputs and community beyond the end of the project.
The resulting CENDARI environment, which was handed over to the DARIAH ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) at the end of the project period, is a powerful new platform for accessing and investigating historical data in a transnational fashion overcoming the national and institutional data silos that exist within the European Research Area. The CENDARI environment has created new ways to discover meaning, a methodology not just of scale but of kind. It has created and drawn together tools and workspaces that allow researchers to engage with large data sets via federated multilingual searches across heterogeneous resources while defining workflows to enable the creation of personalized research environments, shared research and teaching spaces, and annotation trails, amongst other features.
Project Results:
The work performed since the beginning of the CENDARI project has largely been aligned with one or more of the following project features: Project Structure, Archival Directory, Archival Research Guides, Data Integration, CENDARI Enquiry Environment, Archival Research Practices and Transnational Access Programme.
Archival Directory
Throughout the project, the CENDARI project team has worked on the establishment of an Archival Directory through the identification, description and cataloguing of archival holdings and other collections of value for research within the two project pilot areas – World War I and Medieval European Culture. Alongside manually establishing archival descriptions relevant for the Archival Research Guides, members of the WP5 team contacted a broad range of Cultural Heritage Institutions in order to receive data from them to be ingested into the CENDARI repository. A total of 168 Cultural Heritage Institutions were contacted and the final CENDARI Archive Directory contained approximately 830,000 datasets available for users.
By the end of the project, the number of archival descriptions established manually by the team was 3,107 (2,320 for the modern period and 787 for the medieval period) and the number of cultural heritage institutions described in the Archival Directory was 1,251. An overview of the approximately 830,000 datasets harvested by CENDARI and the providers of that data is included below.
Dataspace (Provider) Format Total Format Total Provider
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
(JDC Archives) EAD 2 2
Archives Hub EAD 1189 1189
Bundesarchiv EAD 25384 25384
CENDARI Archival Descriptions EAG 1315
EAD 3996 5311
CENDARI Ontologies docx 1
Rdf 12
xml 1 14
Europeana EDM 287182 287182
Kalliope DC 44347
MODS 44347
EAD 988 89682
The European Library & Europeana
- Newspapers Project EDM 198883
LOD 198883 397766
Ajalooarhiiv EAD 5253 5253
Riigiarhiiv EAD 4895 4895
Tallinna Linnarahiiv EAD 1207 1207
Ottoman Archives PDF over 3000 descriptions
in 211 PDF files 211
Czech Department of Archives Administration EAD 2050 2050
Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen EAD 970 970
Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg EAD 36 36
Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv EAD 35 35
University Library Heidelberg METS 2627 2627
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam EAD 4547 4547
Total number of resources ingested until official end of the project 828369
The Archival Directory can be regarded as a “work in progress”, since researchers and archivists using the CENDARI Archive Directory can find relevant material in collections and archives not yet contained in the Archival Directory and describe it over there to the benefit of all future users
Archival Research Guides
The Archival Research Guides (ARGs) were a significant output of CENDARI. They illustrated paradigmatic approaches to the subjects under question from a transnational, comparative perspective, took into account a trans-medial combination of sources, and provided complementary material of different administrative level creators that is being stored in different archives. The ARGs pertinent to World War I covered almost all current research questions related to the First World War Studies from a transnational perspective, and focused on Eastern Europe as the main objective of CENDARI. The medieval ARGs focused on topics selected as relevant for medieval studies and culture, and introduced important historical sources like manuscripts, a lot of them available digitally.
The Archival Research Guides take up cross-sectional issues, lead the CENDARI user through the wealth of sources available in the Archival Directory and present in a prototypical form the transnational and comparative approach favoured by the CENDARI project.
The Archival Research Guides are intended to act as the connective tissues across archival collections with rich and contextualized information and to guide users to different contents as well as to the application of the tools and services available within the Virtual Research Environment (VRE), thus exemplifying the enhancement of the traditional methods of historical research produced by the project.
The Archival Research Guides facilitate the retrieval of collections and complement the descriptions of the holdings within the CENDARI Archive Directory, by providing historiographical context and methodological support to researchers. They allow for a virtual composition and access to comparable holdings across national and institutional borders, bestowing information on dispersed, relocated material belonging to the same historical context. They cover broad thematic areas of historical research and serve also as examples for user-generated annotations, which may also be further developed in a guide format.
The topics of the CENDARI Archival Research Guides have been selected according to criteria in order to have them being written from a transnational, comparative perspective, taking into account a transmedial combination of sources, and at the same time providing complementary material compiled by creators from different administrative levels and stored in different archives. The Archival Research Guides focus on historical concepts, events or developments and enclose recent historiographical subjects. Special emphasis has been laid on the unexplored, smaller archives across Europe and particularly Eastern and South East Europe. The chosen topics do not claim completeness, as they are perceived as paradigmatic and exemplary collections of information to be enriched and complemented by researchers.
The CENDARI Archival Research Guides cover almost all current research questions relevant for First World War studies, focusing on Eastern Europe as the main objective of the project. The authors of the Archival Research Guides have not only contributed to topics related to their major fields of expertise, but researched also on new ones, which are of interest for the academic community and related to the First World War. The medieval Archival Research Guides focus on topics selected as relevant for medieval studies and culture during the Participatory Design meeting held in Florence on 25 January 2013, organised by FEF, SISMEL and INRI, the COST – CENDARI Summer School, held in Florence in July 2013, and the seminar “Medieval Scholarly Research and the Digital Ecosystem” (Florence, March 20-22, 2014) organized by Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, COST and CENDARI.
16 Archival Research Guides have been provided for modern history, i.e. on the First World War, 9 for medieval history, i.e. on Medieval Culture.
The following list of the CENDARI Archival Research Guides introduces the topics according to their domain, with the names of the lead authors presented in the first position and the collaborators provided in alphabetical order.
First World War:
• Prisoners of War and their Return Home (Pavlina Bobič)
• Coercion and Consent in the Belligerent Armies (Pavlina Bobič)
• Injury and Disease (Pavlina Bobič)
• Workers and Workers’ Movements during the First World War (Jakub Beneš)
• Private Memories of the First World War (Francesca Morselli)
• Women During the First World War (Francesca Morselli, Jörg Lehmann)
• The Fall of the House of Romanov (Anna Bohn)
• National Narratives of the First World War – Memory and Commemoration (Aleksandra Pawliczek)
• Parallel Records and Supplementary Material – Poland (Aleksandra Pawliczek)
• Jews of Eastern Europe in the period 1914–1921 (Andrei Zamoiski)
• Industrial Development during the First World War (Francesca Morselli)
• On the ruins of the Russian Empire: Establishment of New States in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, 1917-1921 (Andrei Zamoiski)
• The Reconstruction of Post-Habsburg East Central Europe, 1918-1921 (Jakub Beneš)
• Islamic Movements in the Russian Empire during and after the First World War (Andrei Zamoiski)
• Science and Technology in the First World War (Jörg Lehmann, Francesca Morselli)
• Methodological Guide on Sources in the Archival Directory AtoM (Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Jörg Lehmann, Francesca Morselli, Lorenza Tromboni, Andrei Zamoiski)
Medieval Culture:
• Italian Books of Poetry (Irene Tani)
• Italian Vernacular Bibles (XIIIth-XVth c.) (Caterina Menichetti)
• Medieval Miscellanies – Homiliaries (Lidia Buono, Eugenia Russo)
• Dominican Lectores in Florence during the 14th century (Lorenza Tromboni)
• Medieval Preaching (Zdeněk Uhlíř, Martin Hlouch)
• Dispersed Medieval Monastic Archives in Florence (18th-19th c.) (Roberta Giacomi, Vinicio Serafini)
• Medieval Collections of Saints Lives (Silvia Nocentini)
• Science in Medieval Central European Sources (Tomáš Klimek, Miroslava Hejnová, Tomislav Kolar)
• Transcribing Medieval Manuscripts and Archival Material (Kathleen Walker-Meikle)
The content of the CENDARI Archival Research Guides does not claim to be exhaustive. Rather they are provided in a way that enables the future users of the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to further enlarge and enrich them. The Guides are perceived as a starting point within the CENDARI Research Infrastructure for research on a given topic and a framework in which to work.
The license applied to the content in the Archival Research Guides is the CC-BY Creative Commons attribution – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ following general rules of scholarly attribution practices. This means that the CC-BY Creative Commons Licence will be applied to the existing content of the Archival Research Guides and all content that users add.
All the Archival Research Guides developed by the CENDARI project can be accessed at:
http://www.cendari.eu/archival-research-guides/
Data Integration
The tools developed within CENDARI are available published on GitHub under open source license. All tools were designed and developed with loose coupling in mind, thus they can be used as single components or integrated with other services of the CENDARI infrastructure. The data integration platform of CENDARI can be extended and integrated with additional indexing and data services and is prepared to accommodate further data formats. The fact that it does not use a complex data integration framework makes it easily adoptable by other projects, with a short learning curve. All data transformations and the log of transformations for each resource are in addition persisted as files on the file system, which makes the infrastructure more attractive for further processing pipelines.
CENDARI delivered functioning infrastructure with strong potential for further extension and reuse, especially due to its open-source orientation and clear separation of data workflows. Despite some components being in beta state (such as the Scraper service or the Multilingual NERD service), they can be used further by the infrastructure, in case they will be deployed to a longer-term stable operating platform.
CENDARI Infrastructure Layer Model
The CENDARI project team consolidated the CENDARI infrastructure in an integrated model. This integrated model, called the CENDARI Infrastructure Layer Model, reached version 1.0 by the project’s closing and can be found as an attachment to this report. The figure shows the final state of CENDARI’s components and how they are connected to each other. This figure served as a guideline for the integration process and provided the developers with an updated view on CENDARI’s infrastructure.
All of the CENDARI tools documentation is available under https://docs.cendari.dariah.eu/index.html. The CENDARI documentation process was closely aligned to the CENDARI development process throughout the project. This approach addressed the nature of current project consortia, which are likely to be distributed across Europe, making collaborative online instruments the obvious choice. The tools used and the publication format as a freely accessible and browsable web page were chosen to allow a constant and smooth updating of the documentation and to improve the usability for the end user but also allowing for adaptation of the structure for other projects or initiatives. This solution was intended as a convenient offer for the user, who can access the documentation directly from within the CENDARI infrastructure or can access it separately.
CENDARI Enquiry Environment
In the centre of CENDARI’s main components resides the Note-Taking Environment (NTE) that functions as the central access point for the user. Within the NTE features can be accessed by the end users that are in fact provided by background components.The online Note Taking Environment (NTE), based on the “EditorsNotes” tool, was further developed and finalised in the final period of the project and the NTE was used as the backbone of the CENDARI Virtual Research Environment for note-taking and faceted search by users. The CENDARI NTE represented a major deviation from the original version of the software since it implemented multiple extensions in terms of services and workflow. It is available on github.com along with all of the other CENDARI developments, see https://github.com/CENDARI/editorsnotes
The CENDARI data ingestion process, as discussed above, allowed documents from multiple formats and sources to be uniformly accessed from the CENDARI environment. The NTE Faceted Search allows searching in these documents, and provides a uniform way for users to access the documents or collect important URLs for their research notes.
Additionally, the whole DBPedia database was indexed and provided in the faceted search; it helps identify entities (people, places, events), as well as facilitating auto-completion when resolving named entities manually.
The original EditorsNotes system was meant to be used on open projects where all the documents and notes are always visible, even if only some users are allowed as editors. This vision of the work of historian was challenged in all our participatory design sessions: historians do not want other historians to look at their notes, unless explicitly collaborating on a specific project. But since CENDARI was a collaborative project, it was agreed with the historians that the significant entities they might add in their notes and documents within the CENDARI infrastructure could become public. Therefore, the public view of their work may reveal that they are working on documents and notes related to a set of persons, places, dates, etc. but not the contents of the text unless they explicitly allow it.
To implement these requirements, the CENDARI team changed the security settings of projects in the NTE and added tools to allow users to share their projects with colleagues so as to collaborate.
The original EditorsNotes had a much simpler user interface since it was not meant to be used for personal research purpose. Historians gather a lot of documents during their documentation work and produce a lot of notes to make sense of their gathered documents. Therefore, the CENDARI infrastructure was developed to provide a user interface that could provide scale in terms of all the documents, notes, and entities. The team enhanced the navigation in order to facilitate cross search and connection between various points of information. The search engine that was initially restricted to documents managed only by EditorsNotes was expanded to show all the documents gathered and indexed in the CENDARI project, offering faceted search and navigation. Users can navigate using either faceted search, through personal or group projects in the NTE, or from the visualisations that show entities related to places and times.
Transnational Access Programme
The CENDARI Transnational Access programme ran throughout the four years of the project and aimed to support and stimulate historical research in the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War by facilitating access to key archives, specialist knowledge and collections in CENDARI host institutions.
The CENDARI project was specifically committed to hosting early career scholars who wished to apply digital humanities methods to their historical enquiry. The fellowships were particularly designed to support researchers from countries without equivalent facilities and early career scholars with limited access to these research infrastructures. The Fellowships were hosted by:
• Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (TCD)
• King’s College London, UK (KCL)
• National Library of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic (NKP)
• Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Göttingen, (GCDH/UGOE)
• Germany University of Stuttgart & Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Germany (USTUTT)
The TNA programme received a total of 68 applications, 57 of which passed the eligibility criteria, and were reviewed by the EEAB and the prospective hosts. A total of 28 fellowships were awarded and 14 female and 14 male early career academics took part in the TNA programme. The fellows came from 18 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom), with a nice spread across Europe (and beyond).
Overall the CENDARI TNA Programme delivered 275 weeks of access to transnational researchers from across Europe. This broke down among the host institutions as follows:
• 22 weeks in the National Library of the Czech Republic
• 42 weeks in University of Stuttgart
• 66 weeks in University of Göttingen
• 78 weeks in Trinity College Dublin
• 67 weeks in King’s College London
Summary details of all TNA fellows and their projects, including their fellowship reports are available on the CENDARI website at http://www.cendari.eu/about-us/transnational-access-fellows.
There were three (groups of) stakeholders in the TNA programme: the CENDARI project, the Fellows and the Hosts. At the end of the programme we may conclude that all stakeholders benefitted from the programme. The project received invaluable input from the fellows, the research projects and future careers of the fellows were given a tangible boost, and the hosts favourably commented on the impetus the programme gave to their staff, not in the least by expanding networks and opening up the opportunity for new collaboration.
Potential Impact:
The CENDARI Impact
The final result delivered by the CENDARI project was an integrated research infrastructure which offers historical researchers a number of services to access and research dispersed digital archival collections within the two pilot areas of the First World War and medieval European culture. The project has delivered a digital research infrastructure that is available to users at www.cendari.eu. The virtual research environment facilitates and enhances digital access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history (at the completion of the project, there were approximately 830,000 datasets available to users). The CENDARI research environment allows users to effectively share knowledge and to collaborate with other users, for the production of world-class research outputs.
CENDARI contributed to the Digital Agenda for Europe by widening the application of technology in historical research and deepening our understanding of how technology can enhance and bring efficiencies to the work of researchers in these fields. The project provided opportunities – through design workshops, testing sessions at the three CENDARI Summer Schools, and feedback from testing sessions with a Trusted Users Group - which allowed historians and collections experts to communicate their real needs in a research infrastructure to the CENDARI technical development team. Through these workshops, historians have been able to identify how technology can bring about innovation in their research practices in terms of computer support, interfaces and the services required. This information was made available for any future infrastructure development projects through the CENDARI deliverables from WP4 – D4.1 Report on Archival Practices and D4.2 Domain Use Cases and from WP8 – D8.1 and D8.2 – Functional Descriptions.
For the archival community, the CENDARI team overcame institutional and national data silos and, particularly for the smaller archives working with CENDARI, increased their exposure to relevant researchers and users. CENDARI’s virtual research environment placed a strong emphasis on not merely enhancing information already visible on-line, but also assisting archives with less well-developed digitisation programmes to find meaningful ways of presenting their collections alongside those of other institutions with similar holdings. “The CENDARI White Book of Archives - Data Exchange Recommendations for Cultural Heritage Institutions and Infrastructure Projects” (Deliverable 9.3) sets out the project’s data exchange recommendations for Cultural Heritage Institutions and Infrastructure Projects based on the lessons learned by the CENDARI project team.
By integrating and enhancing the large variety of data types and sources into a central resource designed with the users, CENDARI will also be able to influence work in other data communities, as a model for digital research infrastructure development relevant not only for historical data, but for other scientific fields. The CENDARI Sustainability Plan (Deliverable 2.4) described the actions that the CENDARI project took, and planned to take, in order to ensure the project’s continued impact after the end of the funded period and it also suggested a model for other, similar initiatives, seeking to plan for and conceptualise their own sustainable futures.
The CENDARI Sustainability Plan (D2.4) was published in January 2016. The development of the Plan involved a comprehensive review of the literature and published experiences of institutions and projects in developing sustainability models for complex digital resources for the arts and humanities. The CENDARI Sustainability Plan sought to build upon the good work done according to these models and to propose a new state of the art of the concept of sustainability for research infrastructures. The Plan described the many facets of what CENDARI created, sought to understand their value for current and future user groups, and made proposals for how to sustain those elements in one or more formats which will best allow them to connect with their users. The Plan presented a "toolkit" for the sustainability of the CENDARI project and its infrastructure, aiming not only to sustain CENDARI and contribute to the DARIAH ERIC’s capacity to advise on sustainable development, but also to support future project teams in thinking about their own projects and their legacies. The Plan presented a concrete response to the hypothesis that a successful approach to sustainability for Research Infrastructures needs to be comprehensive; an approach that doesn’t just consider data or technology, community, communications or processes, but in fact all of them simultaneously.
Beyond the end of the project, a number of CENDARI partners agreed to set up a CENDARI SUSTAIN Working Group within the DARIAH EIRC. The Working Group will support the development of DARIAH by continuing to investigate (in an applied manner) how DARIAH can contribute to the sustainability of research infrastructure projects developed in coordination with it, and how CENDARI can contribute to the realisation of DARIAH.
In addition to CENDARI SUSTAIN, CENDARI’s work also continues in the context of the PARTHENOS Research Infrastructure Cluster project (funded under Horizon 2020 Call INFRA DEV-4-2014; project website is at www.parthenos-project.eu). PARTHENOS brings together CENDARI partners SISMEL, TCD and KCL with representatives of five other research infrastructures and projects (CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH ERIC, ARIADNE, EHRI and IPERION) to share data, technology, knowledge and best practice across the sector. The work of PARTHENOS was launched in May 2015 and will continue through 2019.
CENDARI Dissemination and Exploitation of Results
Throughout the project, the CENDARI team followed a comprehensive communications programme: website, promotional materials, launch events etc. which was successful in making potential CENDARI users aware of its existence. However, the primary aim of the project team was to provide users with a basis for understanding how to apply CENDARI as a tool for archival investigation. This goal will be met by the more in-depth aspects of the CENDARI dissemination programme, in particular the training events, expert seminars, focus groups and other networking events and stakeholder meetings. Each of these elements was intended to create for a different segment of the total user audience for CENDARI a customised delivery to build awareness, trust and investment in the benefits CENDARI provides. The list of various presentations, papers, workshops and seminars at which the CENDARI team engaged with potential users is provided in Table A.2 - List of Dissemination Activities.
The CENDARI website (www.cendari.eu) is the first point of contact for all target user groups. From the beginning of the project, the objective of the website was to present project information, provide information about the project objectives, project funding and the partner institutions. In the first phase of the project, however, the website needed to feature the activity of the project team, whereas the final incarnation needed to be better optimised to deliver access to the functional components of the CENDARI system.
Towards the end of the project, the PMB decided to redesign the project website in order to provide a sustainable, easy to use and attractive online portal for existing and future users to access the infrastructure (the NTE, the ARGs, the CENDARI repository) as well as acting as an archive for the relevant project deliverables, information and reports. A subcontractor was appointed to undertake the revision of the website, both structurally and aesthetically. The new CENDARI website was launched at the CENDARI Project Launch and Final Conference in January 2016, which represents an investment in the future sustainability of the infrastructure and project outputs.
There is an email address for queries to the project (info@CENDARI.eu) which is published on the website and will continue to be administered by the Project Coordinator, TCD in conjunction with the CENDARI Sustain DARIAH Working Group.
The social media presence of CENDARI was established over the lifetime of the project using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for a coordinated and integrated approach. The value of social networks for CENDARI lies in visibility with the target audience of academics, library and archive professionals. The Twitter account (www.twitter.com/CENDARIProject) is extremely useful at live events, such as conferences and the Summer Schools, where use of an appropriate hashtag in conjunction with the project username helps raise awareness of the project and establish virtual conversations with key professionals. The Twitter account continues to be maintained by the Project Coordinator and it will continue to be a useful dissemination resource for the ongoing work of the CENDARI Sustain DARIAH Working Group.
On 14th January 2016, the CENDARI virtual infrastructure and other project results were launched in Berlin at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences & Humanities. It was an occasion to celebrate the achievements of the project and share the lessons learned over the past four years. The full event was live-streamed online via the CENDARI website and over 700 people watched online as CENDARI researchers gave live demonstrations of the research platform, introducing the Note-Taking Environment and the Archival Research Guides to an audience of approximately 80 historians and archivists from cultural heritage institutions at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
In her welcoming remarks, the Project Coordinator Dr Jennifer Edmond, observed “In a globalised Europe, we can no longer afford to treat the evidence of history as belonging only to national silos, but that is still how the archives, libraries and museums of Europe are by and large organised. Through CENDARI historians can approach questions of identity and history transnationally, uncovering shared experiences across borders as well as official narratives contained within them, highlighting also those collections and stories that risk becoming 'hidden' because of how they have been viewed or because they happen to be held in economically less well-off countries.”
Oliver Janz, Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin who coordinated WP5, commented, "The visibility of the holdings and their searchability within a single repository will certainly change the way historians work and support a better planning of travel to archives."
The day concluded with an expert panel contributing to a lively discussion to the final part of the launch, and were happy to take questions via Twitter, proving the truly transnational nature of the project.
List of Websites:
Project Website: www.cendari.eu
Project Email: info@cendari.eu
Project Coordinator: Dr Jennifer Edmond, Director of Strategic Projects for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Email: edmondj@tcd.ie
Project Officer: Ms. Deirdre Byrne, Project Officer, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Email: byrned36@tcd.ie
