The Berlin University Alliance has a high scientific output in the form of publications and research data. So far, these heterogeneous digital resources have been partially made available through isolated data repositories located at the institutions, thus, scattering the resources over several data silos.

The research project A Digital Research Space for the BUA aims to develop an open-source platform to explore and analyze these digital resources, improving the accessibility and discoverability of the data. In the project, the project partners Freie Universität Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin cooperate in the platform development. At the FU, the Human-Centered Computing (HCC) Research Group examines the role of digital research environments for research processes, introducing a new concept of scholarly usability. The HCC assesses scholarly, administrative, and educational requirements within participatory design workshops. In the process, direct and indirect stakeholders (e.g., researchers, librarians) will collaborate in these co-creation design sessions to reflect requirements, examine prototypes, and debate on potential platform designs. We focus on selected use cases and derive recommendations.

The project is funded by Objective 3: Advancing Research Quality and Value and Objective 5: Sharing Resources of the „Berlin University Alliance. Crossing Boundaries toward an Integrated Research Environment“ of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technischer Universität Berlin and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the state of Berlin under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.

Project Partner

• TU Berlin | Department of Telecommunication Systems, Chair for Open Distributed Systems | Dr. Sonja Schimmler
• TU Berlin | Institute of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science, Quality and Usability Lab | NN