Research Data Service for Research on Eastern, Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe (OstData)

From 2019 to 2023, the German Research Foundation (DFG) supports the establishment of a research data service for the research of Eastern, Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe (OstData) at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and four partner institutions.

OstData is designed as a central service for the management of research data pertaining to the research of Eastern, Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe taking place in Germany, and is set up jointly by five institutions relevant in the field: In addition to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Collegium Carolinum – Research Institute for the History of the Czech Lands and Slovakia (CC), the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe (HI) and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) take part in the project. OstData provides the setup of a modular, networked technical infrastructure for the storage, publishing, long-time archiving and search of research data, and provides a large variety of consulting services for the corresponding community of scholars.

OstData is faced with the challenge of curating research data produced Germany-wide under strongly diverging institutional framework conditions, of assuring the quality of these data, pooling them and making them discoverable and retrievable. Accordingly, the system will be a repository based on central and distributed models of data management, archiving and quality assurance. In addition, OstData will offer a central search index, which will be based on a metadata scheme to be drawn up, and which will allow for specialised queries in accordance with the material. By integrating all metadata and, where possible, also full texts into supra-regional search tools, OstData will increase the visibility of the German research on Eastern Europe on a worldwide level.

For the infrastructure to be set up to be known and used by individual researchers and scholarly institutions in their entirety, the project provides for numerous support measures with respect to consultancy, further training and public relations work.

OstData – Research Data Service for Research on Eastern, Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe