{"id":50,"date":"2025-02-17T10:52:27","date_gmt":"2025-02-17T09:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/e-publish.uliege.be\/opening-up-our-heritage\/?post_type=chapter&p=50"},"modified":"2025-09-01T11:10:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T09:10:24","slug":"cultural-heritage-data-slsp","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/e-publish.uliege.be\/opening-up-our-heritage\/chapter\/cultural-heritage-data-slsp\/","title":{"raw":"Cultural Heritage Data @ SLSP: The Cases of the Connectome Project and the Swiss National Library","rendered":"Cultural Heritage Data @ SLSP: The Cases of the Connectome Project and the Swiss National Library"},"content":{"raw":"

SLSP and the Swiss Data Landscape<\/h1>\r\nSwiss Library Service Platform (SLSP) was founded in 2017 by 15 higher education institutions and libraries in Switzerland.[footnote]https:\/\/slsp.ch<\/a>[\/footnote] SLSP aimed to consolidate the datasets of the six existing library consortia in Switzerland into a national platform, operate a centrally managed library system, and offer centrally managed services for libraries. Today, SLSP drives transformation for trustworthy information in Switzerland with around 500 libraries as part of the network, grouped in 31 so-called institution zones in Alma. In addition to traditional academic libraries, this network also includes the special case of patrimonial libraries \u2013 for instance, cantonal libraries.\r\n\r\nHeritage institutions face different challenges when it comes to publishing open data. Since libraries often hold material such as archival records or images in addition to classic digitised texts, these boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred, and general questions arise around licensing, metadata, and APIs (Roued-Cunliffe, 2020<\/a>, Chapter\u00a03). Compared with the situation described in another study (Estermann, 2014<\/a>), the dissemination of this data in Switzerland has made great progress in the last 10 years. In particular, data that is collected in libraries can nowadays be exposed in various ways. Some of the cultural data of Switzerland is exposed via repositories.[footnote]Search results for repositories in Switzerland: https:\/\/www.re3data.org\/search?query=&countries[]=CHE<\/a>[\/footnote] Furthermore, there is already a wide range of cultural and research data available in the common discovery platform swisscovery.[footnote]https:\/\/swisscovery.slsp.ch<\/a>[\/footnote] This data includes digital objects (over one terabyte) in the cloud library system Alma (Alma Digital), as well as external sources searchable via Primo VE. A large portion of digital objects is preferably stored outside of Alma due to missing long-term storage options and control in Alma Digital.\r\n\r\nOver two million records from over 60 institutional repositories, such as e-periodica,[footnote]https:\/\/www.e-periodica.ch<\/a>[\/footnote] are searchable in swisscovery through harvesting among around 40 million records of the libraries' holdings in total. Data can also be made available via portals or aggregators, including the Central Discovery Index (CDI), a large index for scholarly material worldwide provided by Clarivate | Ex Libris, and Europeana, for example. Another approach is to recognise that institutions in Switzerland also register their data via DOI agencies such as DataCite.[footnote]https:\/\/commons.datacite.org<\/a>[\/footnote] This registration makes them part of the persistent identifier (PID) graph and offers added value through the linkage of different entities, e.g. creators, institutions and events.\r\n\r\nTo do justice to this dynamic data landscape with which SLSP is dealing, several projects, such as a joint project called Connectome with Switch and another project with the Swiss National Library are presented below.\r\n

The Case of the Connectome Project<\/h1>\r\n

Open Data Navigator: Aggregating Swiss Data Sources<\/h2>\r\nSwitch operates the national research and education network of Switzerland. It is a member of G\u00c9ANT, a pan-European data network,[footnote]https:\/\/geant.org<\/a>[\/footnote] and collaborates with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Switch is a strategic partner of SLSP and operates many services that SLSP utilises, such as cloud services (e.g. storage and computing), digital identity (edu-ID), and registry (.ch and .li).\r\n\r\nA few years ago, Switch launched a project called Connectome preceded by several labs, for instance, one that addressed the handling of research data in social sciences and humanities (Hauf et al., 2021<\/a>). This project is supported by Swissuniversities[footnote]https:\/\/www.swissuniversities.ch\/en<\/a>[\/footnote]. Connectome's objective is to 'promote reuse of open data from heterogeneous areas' and 'support [the] development of open data practices' (Switch, n.d<\/a>.). To achieve this aim, it harmonises and links metadata through artificial intelligence from various Swiss sources into a knowledge graph. This data can come from administrations, archives, non-governmental organisations, galleries, libraries, museums, and other open data aggregators. Connectome's goal is for data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, following the FAIR principles.\r\n\r\nThe aggregated data is presented to the public in two forms:\r\n