Requesting Crowd Expertise: The SSH Open Marketplace and LIBER

SSHOC is the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) component of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This SSH contribution will provide access to flexible and scalable data as well as relevant and community-driven services via coordinated adaptation of Open Science and FAIR principles across SSH domains. At the core of SSHOC’s contribution is the SSH Open Marketplace: a discovery portal for a rich variety of resources presented in a contextualized way.

The SSH Open Marketplace aspires to achieve tight-knit integration into existing communities of practice in SSH. LIBER, as a community of experts in information practices of the research environment, is an important partner to leverage synergies for the benefit of SSH researchers and Open Knowledge. We see libraries as strategic partners, because information practices and resources in the SSH research environment belong to the core of the SSH Open Marketplace’s mission, just as they do for many libraries and information infrastructures. Building on the dynamic started at the LIBER Conference 2019 (SSHOC: What’s in it for research libraries?), we hope to use this poster to continue the discussion with you on the concepts, ideas or best practices implemented by LIBER communities.

Connecting to the extensive network of LIBER, we want to suggest two angles of mutual exchange, the first one focusing on the social and communicative aspect, the second one aiming at the technological/ information-science aspect of the SSH Open Marketplace:

1. Community-driven curation approach: The SSH Open Marketplace can partly be conceived of as a social infrastructure. This aspect is best expressed by its community-based curation. Three pillars underlie the data population and enrichment of the marketplace’s content: automatic ingestion and updating of data sources; continuous curation of the information by the editorial team and - most importantly - contributions from its users, the SSH community. At release of the final version, we want to say that the marketplace’s content and particularly its contextualisation is the result of collaborative work, characterised by a user-centric view. At the heart of SSH Open Marketplace are features that foster contributions, feedback and comments because they ensure that the portal mirrors real research practices. What are best practices based on your experience? Would you like to join the editorial team?

2. Technology and information-science inspiration: Success for an information discovery portal like the SSH Open Marketplace boils down to its uptake by the targeted audience. But what can technology and information-science provide as inspiration, best-practices, do’s and don’ts? The SSH Open Marketplace relies in large part on harvesting and harmonising records from third-parties like TaPoR, CLARIN, or DARIAH. Looking at the rich experience of libraries in collecting, structuring, enriching and exposing information, we want to hear your feedback regarding our current approach, ideas we may have overlooked or best-practices, and we also want to show you how the Marketplace could support research libraries work. How can we refine our approach to better meet yours and researchers’ needs? And what can you gain using the SSH Open Marketplace to support SSH researchers in your libraries?