Hi,

I'm probably thinking about this too hard, but perhaps someone can shed a different light on this so here goes :)

We are investigating if and how me and my colleagues at the university library's Centre for Digital Scholarship, in cooperation with central IT, should support researchers who want to present and possibly collaborate on their research data on the web. In the past researchers received little to no support and resorted to SharePoint (with support, but limited possibilities) or setting up a website on a department server, paying an external developer or putting a PhD student in charge. Some chose to use another institution's project website, others may have used a home server.

I'm looking for examples of (university) libraries that provide support for hosting websites centered around data(bases), hoping to get answers for questions like:

·         how do you collaborate with researcher and IT?

o    do you help build websites or just guide the researcher through the IT department's offers?

o    do you collaborate closely with IT to provide this service?

·         do you offer managed websites in which the researcher has some degree of freedom to do anything she wants?

o    e.g. offer webhosting with a control panel like DirectAdmin/cPanel/… access and 'package manager' like Installatron/Scriptalicious?

o    e.g. offer a small range of software packages like WordPress, Omeka, MediaWiki, … and database management like phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin?

·         what kind of support would you offer for researchers' existing custom built websites and/or databases if the owner wants to transfer control to the library?

Of course there won't be a single simple solution for all situations. For database hosting with a web UI we looked at the Online Research Database Service<http://ords.ox.ac.uk/index.xml>, but the University of Oxford are phasing out the service and will stop supporting the (open source) software. We are building an Islandora repository for various library collections and in some cases it might serve as virtual research environment too, but it isn't a natural fit for e.g. actively used relational data.

Thanks for your help!

Ben

Ben Companjen
Digital Scholarship Librarian
Centre for Digital Scholarship, UBL
Universiteit Leiden

Witte Singel 26/27, kamer 025
Postbus 9500
2300 RA Leiden

Telefoon +31 71 527 88 58
E-mail [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
https://twitter.com/bencomp