Data Diplomacy

Editor's note The following contribution originally results from an oral response to the presentations and discussions at the Access to Waxes conference in Berlin in December 2021. It is therefore, especially in comparison to the other articles within this issue, to be understood primarily as a kind of fundamental positioning and has been included here for that very reason. In it, the specific example of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv's holdings and their accessibility and digitization is taken as an opportunity to draw particular attention to the connection between technical infrastructures and science diplomacy. At the level of metadata and repositories, it cannot be a matter of constructing new, finally "valid" identities, claiming ownership, etcetera. The point, then, is to enable the negotiation of these issues through access to the sources. The question is who would create and moderate a space for such international negotiations. This could be done, for example, within the framework of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur/NFDI) and in exchange with UNESCO.