The Working Group on “Sustainable Publishing of Metadata” has been active within the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) European network since 2016. The working group aims to present and share information regarding ongoing and established projects which deal with the creation, reproduction and sharing of metadata between institutes and researchers within the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. This presentation is a follow-up to the presentation Cracking digital archival research and metadata: Archives Portal Europe (https://metadata.hypotheses.org/53) held during the DARIAH EU meeting in November 2020. This presentation was prepared as part of a Seminar in DANS | Centre of expertise & repository for research data (knaw.nl) on 28 September 2021 and deals with the possibility of synergies between different European infrastructures and European projects, with as concrete case the Parthenos project (PARTHENOS Project – Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies (parthenos-project.eu), Archives Portal Europe (HOME – Archives Portal Europe) and the possibilities of the new archival standard Records in Context (Records in Contexts – Conceptual Model | International Council on Archives (ica.org).
All posts by Johan Vandereycken
A repository for research data in Belgium!
We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Social Sciences and Digital Humanities Archive ‘SODHA’. SODHA is a data archive – an archive for datasets produced in the course of scientific investigations – in which researchers can deposit and find reusable data in any discipline of social sciences and the (digital) humanities.

Datasets published through SODHA receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which makes them likelier to be harvested by search engines, thus boosting their online visibility. This not only highlights researchers’ accomplishments in the form of data collections alongside academic publications; it also makes datasets citable and findable, like other traditional sources such as articles, book chapters, books, conference proceedings, etc.
In this way data collected and prepared thanks to public funding are made accessible for reuse, and researchers’ efforts are publicly rewarded. They become thus findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable — in one word: FAIR data.
As a new service of the State Archives of Belgium, SODHA is committed to preserving research materials with the same quality standards and warranties already adopted by its home federal archive institution. SODHA also promotes open science and transparency by encouraging researchers to deposit their data under an open licence, which facilitates data reuse and enables scientific replication. SODHA relies on the open-source Web application Dataverse. Thanks to the BISHOPS project (Belgian Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities Open Science), we are now broadening SODHA’s scope to include the (digital) humanities.
Would you like to browse the SODHA dataset collections or to deposit your own? Access SODHA here: https://www.sodha.be/
It is possible to follow up the project via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/social-sciences-and-digital-humanities-archive-%E2%80%93-sodha/?viewAsMember=true
DARIAH-EU WG Sustainable Publishing of Metadata
The Working Group on “Sustainable Publishing of Metadata” has been active within the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) European network since 2016. The working group aims to present and share information regarding ongoing and established projects which deal with the creation, reproduction and sharing of metadata between institutes and researchers within the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. The contributions on this blog will document both the activities of the working group as well as present projects dealing with this use of metadata. We wish to realize a collaboration between European and pan-European research infrastructures and in this way stimulate the exchange of expertise between them as well as projects led by partners. This working group aims to disseminate best practices and the use of standards (EAD, DDI, RIC, IIIF, …). Its members are (next to DARIAH), among others, involved in the research infrastructures CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives), EHRI (European Holocaust Infrastructure), APE (Archives Portal Europe), Europeana,…