Future e-Research Support in the Humanities II

The DFG project “Future e-Research Support in the Humanities” (FuReSH), carried out at the University Library (UB) of Humboldt University in Berlin (HU), produced a concept study on the feasibility of implementing so-called scholarly makerspaces into the range of services offered by university libraries. The planned “FuReSH II” project is a follow-up application for the prototypical implementation and evaluation of a corresponding infrastructure offering based on this study and in the concretization of a disciplinary use case. The basic idea behind scholarly makerspaces is a local, community-based mediation structure for tool literacy in the digital humanities. The concept of “tool literacy” follows to a certain extent the idea of “makerspaces” in public libraries, but here refers to the competence in using digital research tools in both technical and methodological terms.

The starting point for the concept study was the observation that the traditional understanding of service in academic libraries, which focuses primarily on inventory-related provision and development, is not adequate to support data-intensive and tool-based digital forms of work and research in the necessary breadth, both organizationally and technically. This is particularly true in the humanities and cultural sciences, where research objects are increasingly available in digital form as text, image, and AV materials. At the same time, the canon of methods is gradually being expanded to include digital procedures. In addition to digitized and genuinely digital research collections, numerous innovative research tools are now available for processing and analysis.