Connecting trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories (CONNECTED) was an activity, supported by AHRC, undertaken over the course of 2021/2022. Led by the British Library, with the ADS and the Oxford Text Archive as co-investigators, and supported by consultants from MoreBrains Cooperative, the project reviewed approaches and attitudes to data sharing and archiving in the Arts and Humanities. Through a number of focus groups and workshops the project gauged the needs and requirements of researchers and repositories to overcome the challenges of storing and describing complex outputs and portfolios of work within a distributed humanities data infrastructure.
The project has submitted a final report to the AHRC with a number of recommendations for future work, primarily an active tool (‘switchboard’) that would use a minimal set of questions to matchmake datasets with a suitable repository, and take the researcher to the appropriate upload page.
