CENDARI s Grand Challenges: Building, Contextualising and Sustaining a New Knowledge Infrastructure.

Abstract

In its widest sense, infrastructure allows us as finite individuals to achieve beyond our individual capacity to know, to do, to see. But even within the more narrow context of research infrastructures, broad and diverse definitions exist of how such an infrastructure should deliver these enhancements in knowledge and perspective. The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) project was launched in 2012 to address some of the gaps in provision for digital historical research, building on a long tradition of work in libraries, archives, digital humanities research centres and other research infrastructures. What distinguishes CENDARI, however, is its focus on what the project team has identified as the `grand challenges? for each of its contributing stakeholder groups: collections experts based in libraries and archives, historians of the medieval and modern periods, and e-Scientists. This ethos, combined with its close relationship at European level to DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, has instigated a unique and fruitful approach to supporting historical research with digital resources, tools and spaces.