Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud: What’s in it for research libraries?

Reporting back from SSHOC workshop at LIBER2019

Over 100 people recently attended the first SSHOC workshop, organised by project partners CLARIN, DANS, DARIAH and LIBER to highlight the project, the planned SSH Open Marketplace and activities towards building expertise for users, such as the SSHOC Training Network and Toolkit.

The workshop (held 26 June 2019) was part of LIBER’s 2019 Annual Conference, and as such most attendees were librarians and library managers from Europe’s research library community. The workshop began with presentations on the project, Marketplace and the SSHOC Training Network, followed by an interactive session during which participants were asked to provide feedback about their needs regarding skills building and training in the SSHOC context.

Finding research datasets

Participants’ answers during the interactive session showed that the majority receive requests for finding or advising on research datasets and tools on a monthly basis, and that the main obstacle in this discovery process is a lack of information on where to find the datasets and tools. They suggested improving the discovery process by:

• Making datasets more visible;
• Improving metadata quality;
• Creating curated lists or service directories (open source) of datasets, or one easy-to-navigate platform for all;
• Giving practical training;
• Adding to repositories and datasets that researchers already use (don’t reinvent the wheel);
• Encouraging community building and collaboration across communities.

Research Libraries as intermediaries between SSHOC and its end users 

Research libraries play a key role in supporting, promoting and enabling research production activities and are an essential part of the research and scholarship ecosystem. They are intermediaries between the SSHOC and end users of the SSHOC and therefore, engaging with this community and receiving input from them is essential for the project to be able to reach its target user base and achieve its objectives.

For libraries, the SSHOC Marketplace is of particular interest. It will serve as a helpful platform to reinforce the relationship between librarians and researchers, will support librarians with their own training needs and will be a one-stop-shop for existing and useful resources, tools and services that can support their work. 

Could not attend the workshop?

You can access all workshop presentations of the workshop on Zenodo.

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