JISC

An interview with Dr Ralf Goebel of German national research foundation, the DFG

Researchers all over the world have the ‘right’ to access the scholarly resources they need. In the digital age, this means that the digitisation of scholarly resources becomes an imperative for education and research bodies across Europe.  

So says the man responsible for digitisation at Germany’s national research foundation, the DFG, (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). With a current annual budget of around 30m Euros – a figure that could double from 2008 - the organisation responsible for funding research in Germany is setting the agenda in the field of European digitisation.

Dr Ralf Goebel is the DFG’s digitisation programme manager. Speaking on a recent fact-finding visit to the UK, he says that making available and preserving a nation’s heritage through the digitisation of scholarly resources has become an activity of national and indeed international importance.  

‘Europe’s high-performance libraries need to create digital information environments which are integrated across regions’‘Europe’s high-performance libraries need to create digital information environments which are integrated across regions,’ he says. ‘These should allow access to a wide range of up-to-date research literature, digitised research sources and e-learning materials from any location’. This means the library sees it role expand, he continues – beyond its traditional role as the keeper of cultural memory and towards a central place in the research-led scholarly communications environment of the twenty-first century - and one with digitised resources at its heart. This, he suggests, is a vision which all national bodies need actively to support.

As one of those national bodies, the DFG has as its mission the promotion of science and the humanities in Germany. With the bulk of its 1.3bn Euro budget funding research projects as well as the national infrastructure for research, it is the equivalent of, roughly speaking, a combination of the UK research councils and JISC. The level of integration the DFG is able to leverage is noteworthy therefore and as far as digitisation is concerned its achievements are impressive. 

Challenges in digitisation

In the last five years the DFG has funded over 100 digitisation projects to the tune of some 25m Euros. Researchers themselves have been actively involved in deciding which resources should be digitised, a system of ‘peer review’, Goebel suggests, which is vital to the credibility and usefulness of the resources created. The digitisation of all printed books from the sixteenth, seventeenth and many from the eighteenth century is central to the DFG’s plans for the future. ‘Pilot projects are already underway,’ he says. ‘We expect that the printed works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be digitised by 2012.’

One of the great challenges facing Germany in this field is that up to 1919 there had been no central national archive. But this, suggests Ralf Goebel, has been turned to Germany’s advantage in a number of ways. ‘Thanks to Germany’s history,’ he says, ‘which is marked by the late unification of numerous small states and provinces, Germany is particularly rich in archives. These archives contain historical records and sources that are indispensable for humanities research in Germany and in Europe. We have an extraordinarily rich information landscape with a wide variety of initiatives and archives which means that national coordination becomes of especial importance. So the DFG will be launching a major initiative next year to digitise the finding aids and catalogues of these archives.’ 

More importantly perhaps, this more disparate and decentralised history chimes strongly with the vision of a distributed network of virtual libraries well suited to serving the research community’s needs in the digital age. ‘The role of a virtual national library is taken by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sammlung Deutscher Drucke, which is a collaborative project of six libraries committed to building a comprehensive collection of German literature since the invention of letterpress printing. Quite appropriately it wants to carry the idea of a decentralised national library into the digital age. First and foremost, this requires each library to digitise its own holdings. I expect that we will see the first proposals next year.’

Dr Goebel is adamant that the resource created by such a programme would have been an enormous boon to him during his own professional and academic development. ‘I studied German literature and so I had to make journeys – physical journeys – around the whole of Germany and to many of its libraries to look at all the old books,’ he recalls. ‘That would have been so much easier if I’d had online access to all those rare books.  

‘Later on I worked at the “Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage” as a librarian in the manuscripts department where they had very rare materials. But there it was very hard for people to get access to those materials because they were very old and because of the problems of preservation. It would have been so much better if all those materials could have been online. These things were very important motivations to me. So later on it was a natural move for me to go to the DFG to promote digitisation in a research context.’

But Goebel sees the DFG’s remit going even further than this. ‘Of course, our main interest is to support the research and scientific community. But we strongly believe that innovation and access shouldn’t be limited to a small number of people. We need to serve everyone. 'We strongly believe that innovation and access shouldn’t be limited to a small number of people. We need to serve everyone.' So we try to open access to our resources.  

‘Like JISC, the DFG has signed the Berlin Declaration which commits us to promoting open access for our resources. Likewise we negotiate national licenses for digital publications – so far this has made available about 240 million pages of materials, plus about 140 million database entries – and we ensure that in 50% of these cases all of these licensed resources are available to every German citizen. Older books should also be free to everyone in the world. These are important factors in the work of the DFG in the field of digitisation.’

JISC and the DFG

Goebel praises JISC’s digitisation programme which is digitising a wealth of resources across four centuries of UK life and history and which is also driven by the same considerations as the work in Germany. ‘Our two programmes have a lot to learn from each other,’ he suggests. ‘We have the same challenges. We should cooperate much more closely, especially on questions such as digitisation techniques and standards and so on. I’ve seen on this trip how your projects cooperate with each other, meeting with one another twice a year. We in Germany should make sure this happens too so that problems can be shared and common solutions found. This is an excellent idea which I’ll certainly be taking back with me.’ 

Such lessons are reciprocal, adds Goebel, pointing to some areas where the German experience could be to the UK’s advantage: ‘For our part we have great experience in building up distributed resources and in coordinating corresponding technical infrastructures. In a similar way we might be better placed to coordinate international cooperation. Such things can strengthen both of us.’

JISC and the DFG, along with counterpart organisations in the Netherlands and Denmark - the SURF Foundation and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF) - are partners in the Knowledge Exchange, a pan-European organisation which aims to develop closer working relationships in order to increase the return on national investments in ICT. Could the Knowledge Exchange be a forum for common approaches to digitisation? 

‘Yes, it could,’ replies Ralf Goebel. ‘The Knowledge Exchange is looking to develop common policies where appropriate and to cooperate in a range of areas. It’s very difficult to coordinate activities but we have an opportunity to show real results and support our core work in our respective countries. For example, JISC is a very interesting partner for us. In some areas you have developed solutions which are in many ways ahead of us. But this is what the organisation and international cooperation in general is all about – the exchange of knowledge, expertise so that we can all serve our communities better.’

With the digitisation of scholarly resources becoming a subject of national importance, so the need for this level of cooperation across national boundaries needs to become a central goal for education and research bodies across Europe, says Ralf Goebel. ‘Cooperation is a must in the digital world. All over the world, libraries and archives are beginning to digitise their holdings. We have to think about how these activities should be coordinated and integrated – not just to avoid redundant work but also to share and harmonise technologies. Perhaps Germany and the UK could take the first step here,’ he suggests. 

‘The overriding goal of all our efforts should be to implement an integrated digital environment for information provision. Digitised content is a key component of this digital library – a digital library that will stimulate research competition as well as creativity and innovation in Germany, the UK and Europe.’

For further information, please go to: DFG 

                                                       JISC Digitisation programme