heiRIS – The modular research infrastructure

For almost 20 years, a modular digital infrastructure (heiRIS - Heidelberg Research Infrastructure) has been continuously built at the Heidelberg University Library on the basis of strategically selected projects, with a special focus on the needs of the humanities, the "digital humanities". It is used for working with digitized data, digital media and texts and includes tools for semantic modeling, image annotation, text editing and scientific publication. Indexing with authority data, library cataloguing, making research data available and long-term archiving ensure sustainability and high attractiveness of the Heidelberg offer. It is therefore an "ecosystem" of interlinked services which has been built up strategically over almost two decades and has thus grown historically. The contents recorded and archived in these distributed systems are bibliographically recorded in K10Plus and can thus be found and received across national and international borders.

The library's targeted focus on publishing activities also has organizational consequences. The newly founded department "Publication Services" bundles the diverse activities in the house, systematically defines publishing process flows, develops business models and elaborates and, in close cooperation with the Department of Information Technology, forward-looking technical procedures and workflows.

The beneficiaries of these sustainable storage locations, research infrastructures, and presentation platforms for in-depth indexing, archiving, and scholarly use are, on the one hand, the university institutions and projects at Heidelberg University. However, in the context of its national mission within the DFG-funded “Specialist Information Services for Science” (FID), Heidelberg UB also provides the specialist community of the Heidelberg FIDs arthistoricum.net (art history), Propylaeum (ancient studies), and FID4SA (South Asia) with these offerings for open access publishing.