404 not found – Approaches for Ensuring the Sustainable Management of Living Resources apart from Data Repositories in the Digital Humanities

Especially within the Digital Humanities living resources can be central research outputs. Examples are databases accessible through websites with additional tools for data analysis, or digital scholarly editions. They are often used for making research data available within a specific (and necessary) context and need to be made as findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as research data. There are still no standardized workflows and infrastructural services, also not from repositories, for handling living resources in a sustainable way. In fact, many living resources, along with their associated research data, are lost shortly after deployment. In my presentation I will discuss the challenges of handling living resources and relate them to already existing strategies and their vulnerabilities. I will present a new approach for managing living resources by considering the responsibilities of different stakeholders – researchers, funding institutions and data centers/libraries and infrastructural institutions – and argue for their orchestration. In this way, I am contributing to the Open Repositories conference by addressing a central challenge in research and software data management, which at first sight might seem untypical for the conference, but which is a discussion we must have.