As a result, we are producing a wealth of rich training materials: lesson plans, slideshows, instructions for group learning exercises, and more, which might be reusable by others – but only if they are openly published, discoverable, with licenses and citation information provided.
With this in mind, the DANS Training Team is endeavoring to publish more of its reusable training materials using Zenodo. As an open and very widely used repository for digital objects, Zenodo is a suitable place to share training materials in a way that ensures that they have a persistent identifier—so we can all continue to access and reliably cite them in the future.
To make these resources more discoverable, we maintain a growing DANS-KNAW Training Materials Zenodo community, which groups together our materials in a way that makes them easier for potential re-users to find. Some examples of our recently published materials are:
- ‘Making Qualitative Data Reusable’, Ricarda Braukmann and Maaike Verburg presented a workshop to a small group of data supporters on navigating common challenges when working with qualitative data, especially with the aim to be as open as possible. The slides from this workshop are published in Zenodo, thereby widening the reach of the key messages of the workshop: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15696286 (in English).
- ‘Oral History deponeren bij DANS’ (Depositing Oral History Data at DANS) – depositing and sharing oral history data requires some specific knowledge relating to privacy legislation, adding metadata, and the use of thesauri in a digital workflow. Jetze Touber has shared training materials from a workshop where participants learnt how to deposit and share their oral history interview recordings in the DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15433721 (in Dutch).
- ‘Tools for FAIR Data‘ – there are many useful tools that can be used to enhance and facilitate FAIR data sharing, such as re3data, FAIRsharing.org, FAIR-Aware, RDM kit, and the Guide to FAIR and structured ecological data. If you do not know much about these, check out this presentation by Kim Ferguson for an introduction: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15520123 (in English).
When we publish our materials in our Zenodo community, we also share them with other relevant communities. Examples include the ODISSEI Community and the Leiden Centre for Digital Scholarship Community. This ensures that our partners and collaborators can share these materials widely within their own networks.
We have been pleased to observe the numbers of views and downloads that the materials have received so far. However, of course download metrics only tell us so much, and we would be very pleased to know if you are looking at and reusing the materials—and why and for what?
Who knows, this could even open up a new opportunity for collaboration, in the true spirit of open education and open science!
So, if you have viewed, downloaded and/or found our training materials to be inspiring and reusable, please contact DANS Training Coordinator, Dr Deborah Thorpe.
