From Questions to Confidence. A Résumé of 5 Years NFDI4Culture Helpdesk

Over the past five years, the NFDI4Culture consortium has established itself as a leading provider of research data management (RDM) support serving researchers, GLAM institutions, persons from the cultural sector and citizen scientists in the field of digital cultural heritage. It is time to take stock: In this talk, we will review the NFDI4Culture Helpdesk's accomplishments and struggles to date. The Helpdesk has been designed as an explicitly low-threshold service supporting individuals with issues ranging from digitisation and data enrichment to the archiving and subsequent use of research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets. Our approach is to offer advice along the process, providing facts or spotting alternative solutions without an anticipated outcome. The personal dialogue with at least two participating helpdesk team members and a relationship of trust with our clients is essential in our consulting process. In order to provide competent consulting we hold internal feedback meetings, foster collegial advice, and invest into professional training sessions for helpdesk team members. Furthermore, the team is in close contact with the process owners and providers of the entire NFDI4Culture service portfolio, and also cooperates with other research data management helpdesks, in particular with those of the NFDI consortia in the humanities. At the CoRDI, we will present the results of a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of more than 700 consultations, we analyse the development of our user groups, their topics and needs over the past five years. Furthermore, we give insights into our central project management tool, OpenProject that enables us to document all consultations and workflows. As a ticketing system it helps us manage our Helpdesk requests and allows shared access to consultations within a defined group. It also facilitates detailed reporting for the funding institutions. In this talk, we present the most important lessons learnt from five years of helpdesk work in NFDI4Culture and explore how our approach and workflow is tailored to meet the specific contexts and requirements of our users and community, as well as the limitations of support.