Thematic focus and projects at the Open Science Lab

The digital opening of science and culture depends on the continuous development of new tools and methods. The binding and open collaboration along real use cases with communities in science, culture and their infrastructures are crucial for us to transfer new methods and tools into practice.

Two large and several small thematic clusters have developed in the Open Science Lab over time.

OpenGLAM

OpenGLAM stands for digital opening of cultural assets and practices of collecting, indexing and preserving in galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

  • The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI for short) is a funding programme of the German Joint Science Conference (GWK) in which consortia from various disciplines are to improve the quality and accessibility of research data. The Open Science Lab represents TIB in the NFDI4Culture consortium, which covers the subjects of architecture, art history, and music and media studies.
  • As part of the externally funded project Places of Gestapo Terror in Contemporary Lower Saxony, we are making historical heritage freely accessible in the form of a digital map, using the digital monument atlas of Lower Saxony, Wikidata and Wikibase, among others.
  • With Coding da Vinci Niedersachsen, the OSL brought the Cultural Data Hackathon 2020 to 2021 to our federal state for the first time.
  • Within the framework of student projects (cf. university cooperation), information on monuments and other cultural objects is supplemented and visualised in Wikidata.

Open Research Information

The Lab Open Research Information aims to make information on research activities interoperable, findable, reusable and accessible.

Further activities

In addition to the above-mentioned activities, the OSL offers space for new approaches that are continuously cultivated - at times even without additional project funds and personnel resources - mainly in time-limited cooperation projects:

  • Web 3 Science: as part of our contributions to the EU-funded TIB projects QualiChain and ConDIDI, we are exploring the potential of web standards from the field of Self-sovereign Identity (SSI) for education, culture and research. Contact: Lambert Heller and Ingo Keck.
  • Book Sprints is a method of agile knowledge creation and transfer, with which we support organisations and expert networks in developing textbooks and other knowledge resources. Contact: Lambert Heller and Simon Worthington.

Experimental services

We provide insights into our current research and development work: In the TIB Labs and on GitHub you will find experimental services, beta versions and prototypes that are not (yet) in regular operation at TIB.

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