Research and Development

The Göttingen State and University Library runs one of the largest research and development departments among Germany's libraries. The focal points include developing and establishing digital research infrastructures for scientific data and services as well as researching different aspects of research data management.

We try to recognize emerging trends in the information and knowledge society at an early stage, to take them up and make them usable for science – and thereby to contribute directly to readjusting the role of academic libraries in the 21st century.

Our department is financed almost exclusively through third-party funds, with research projects funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), German Research Foundation (DFG), European Union (EU), European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and others. The department’s services are recognized and used far beyond the library: at the University of Göttingen and other local research institutions (e. g. Max Planck Society, University Medical Center), but also on a national and international level.

The department was created together with Germany's first mass digitisation centre, the Göttingen Digitisation Centre, in the 1990s. Today, RDD is subdivided into three programme areas:

• Digital Humanities
• Research Infrastructures
• Research Data

The programme areas collaborate with researchers from a wide variety of disciplines and cover different contents from consulting, conceptual design to software development and operations. In order to be able to provide this wide range of technical, organizational and communication-related aspects, the programme areas work closely with one another, but also with other departments in the library.

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