DATA-KBR-BE will optimise KBR’s existing ICT infrastructure to stimulate sustainable data-level access to KBR’s digitised collections for digital humanities research. For this project, research teams at UGent and the UAntwerp will work closely together with the collection, digitisation, and ICT experts at KBR to co-design two interdisciplinary research scenarios that will extract relevant thematic datasets from BelgicaPress (KBR’s digitised historical newspaper collection) for reuse and analysis in the field of digital humanities. Following this exploratory phase, at least three Open Science datasets would be

co-curated by KBR and the universities of Ghent and Antwerp and published on data.kbr.be – a new open data platform that will be designed during the project. The datasets curated during the project will be compliant with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles of research data management, and deposited in a Trusted Digital Repository. Towards the end of the project, scientific exploitation and social valorisation of these federal open datasets would be stimulated through the organisation of subject-specific high-profile hackathons. This project proposal is fully aligned with KBR’s new strategic plan for 2019-2021, responding particularly to its strategic objectives to a) publish as much information online as possible and facilitate its (re)use; b) provide easy and sustainable access to information, both on-site and in an online environment; and c) stimulate and facilitate scientific research in digital humanities. To this end, the projects will consider ways to embed its research results into KBR’s day-to-day operations from the outset. One crucial deliverable of this project, for example, is to design a sustainable workflow that will enable KBR to support the extraction of datasets for digital (humanities) research projects in a systematic (‘business as usual’) manner.

The Open Science Datasets that will be curated and made accessible in DATA-KBR-BE will enable KBR to make a significant contribution to a range of both National and International Research Infrastructures. These include the Belgian node of DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities which provides sustainable portfolio of services enabling digital enabling digital scholarship in the Arts and Humanities in Belgium and beyond; the CLARIAH:

Open Humanities Service Infrastructure project, which embeds high-quality, user-friendly tools and resources into the workflows of humanities researchers; and the BELSPO-funded BISHOPS (Belgian Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities Open Science) project that will develop an infrastructure to support the collection, description, preservation and reuse of digital research data that are produced by Federal Scientific Institutions (FSIs) such as KBR in the fields of humanities and social sciences. DATA-KBR-BE will therefore facilitate data-level access to digitised cultural heritage

collections, which will in turn enable researchers across the arts, humanities and social sciences to contribute to the European Open Science Cloud: the European Commission’s open environment for storing, sharing and re-using scientific data and results across disciplines and borders in Europe.