About FUNDus!

The FUNDus! Collections Portal provides an insight into the collections of the University of Hamburg, the Leibniz-Institut for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) and the Staats- and Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (SUB). More than twelve million natural science objects of high scientific value are held by the university's network of natural science collections and museums alone. Making these unique resources visible to science and the public is made possible by the close cooperation of the Center for Sustainable Research Data Management with the Central Office for Scientific Collections.

Functionality

The portal brings together collections from very different fields, from arachnology to plaster sculptures to computer museum objects. Specific metadata is defined separately for each collection to reflect the diversity of objects. A full text search allows searching the entire FUNDus! portal. With the help of the advanced search it is possible to search for specific characteristics within a collection.

Collections

The portal currently describes a total of 64 objects of the UHH and LIB scientific collections. Since the first release in July 2018 until now, digital objects from collections have been described and made available in FUNDus! All objects are tagged with specific metadata and most have at least one digitized item. We operate a dedicated media server for the 62817 derivates.

Amount of Objects in the Collection Portal

Interfaces

The most commonly used data format for adding metadata is CSV (or Excel) for direct import. In addition, the portal supports the formats XML (Lido/OAI-PMH) as well as JSON for harvested metadata.

Dedicated interfaces enable data reconciliation with data published in the Research Data Repository (RDR). Research data that has been sustainably saved in the RDR and stored with persistent identifiers (DOIs) for referencing and reuse can thus be presented in FUNDus at the object level. Alignment with other networks is also possible (e.g. with the Digikult network).

An interface to the German Digital Library (DDB) is under development. This can significantly increase the visibility of the collections in a supra-regional context. The transfer of data to the DDB is optional. The prerequisite is a corresponding agreement and clarification of the conditions (licenses).

Functional enhancements in the area of research were tested in collaboration with the House of Computing and Data Science (HCDS), among others, and will be successively integrated into the portal to enable new ways of accessing the data and other perspectives on the collections.

Participate

If you want to publish your scientific collection in FUNDus!, please contact the Central Office for Scientific Collections at the University of Hamburg or the address given under "Contact".

The Centre for sustainable Research Management offers courses and workshops about specific topics on research data management. If you are interested in a workshop for your field, please contact us.

Answers to the most frequently asked questions about data publication in FUNDus! can be found on the collections portal website under Service.