Berlin University Alliance

Audio-Visual.Digital (av.d) will be an infrastructure accessible to all institutions of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA), in which audiovisual research data from the humanities and social sciences can be preserved, catalogued, shared and reused in accordance with the FAIR principles. In the “Sharing Multimodal Data” project, funded by the BUA for the year 2026, the Digital Interview Collections department of the University Library at Freie Universität Berlin is developing a prototype to demonstrate the need for and feasibility of such a platform.

Audio-Visual.Digital is based on the Oral-History.Digital research data platform established at Freie Universität. There, oral history interview projects can upload their audio and video data, along with accompanying materials, and process them using tools for automatic transcription and thematic tagging. Through a sophisticated user management system, content can be made accessible at a granular level depending on the stage of cataloguing and the rights situation. The information infrastructure is based on open-source software; the research data is stored and processed securely and in compliance with data protection regulations.

In close coordination with the BUA research data management project CARDS and the Digital Collections Network, this research and enquiry environment is now being expanded for various application scenarios across BUA institutions. Initially, information about the project is being disseminated across the institutions, relevant holdings, data-specific requirements and institution-specific workflows are being identified, and pilot projects are being initiated. 

To improve technical interoperability, the oh.d software is being extended to meet different requirements and deployed as a new instance. Preparations are underway for subsequent integration into the BUA Shared Services Catalogue and the BUA Data Space.

To this end, the project team is collaborating with researchers from various disciplines at Charité, TU and HU on three pilot projects. These pilot projects, which are limited in scope, focus on the one hand on individual adaptations that can be implemented within a short timeframe, and on the other hand on conceptual agreements and requirement specifications as a basis for subsequent further development, including that funded by third-party grants. The pilot projects for the history of medicine, video sociology and European ethnology are designed to complement one another and are conceived in such a way as to significantly expand the disciplinary and institutional scope of the infrastructure as a whole. An extension to further disciplines, such as Semitic studies, will be examined during the course of the project. Appropriate dissemination measures will publicise the project results within the BUA framework and beyond.