Roxanne Wyns (KU Leuven/LIBIS) is leader of work package 6 (Resource Discovery and Linking for Religious Studies). Three months after the kick-off meeting of ReiReS, she gives an update on the developments in this work package.
“As a starting community the ReIReS consortium has the challenging ambition to create a research infrastructure to facilitate religious studies on a pan-European scale from the ground up. To achieve this, the work is focused on two main aspects: 1) bringing together people and sharing knowledge; 2) bringing together the dispersed digital sources to improve digital access to the research material such as archival documents, databases, texts and books used as a core part of religious studies. Work package 6 has already kick started its work in order to bring together the numerous digital resources and databases already available in the domain of religious studies, both from public research institutions and from commercial publishers. The ambition is to make them findable via is single data discovery service and present them in a unified and standardized manner. The benefits are plentiful, the most obvious ones being only having to search for relevant sources for religious studies in a single location and finding the less visible datasets often still hosted on local networks or personal computers.
The first task of our work package was to map the existing datasets within the ReIReS consortium and get an overview of the used standards, export formats and automated exchange options. We are currently in the process of analysing these datasets. An overview of all of them will be published shortly on the ReIReS website (reires.eu) so researchers from within and outside of the consortium can already enjoy the material available in an early stage.
Of course, it will take a bit longer to develop the ReIReS discovery platform, so stay tuned for more news in the following newsletters to come…”
Roxanne Wyns