This guide is primarily aimed at the professional communities addressed by the NFDI4Culture consortium, but also reaches far beyond. Readers working within the consortium's field should have expertise in architecture, art, music, theatre, dance, film, or media studies, as well as professional experience in the areas of digital strategy or data management. People working in projects, research, and cultural heritage institutions that produce and manage data can learn here how to make this research and collection data as reusable as possible.
In the academic sector, the primary audience includes researchers who, within the framework of often time-limited projects, work with specific resources or collections under particular research questions and are involved in the development of data management plans during project planning or implementation. Through existing collaborations, it is not uncommon for research data managers from infrastructure institutions to be involved. They too are expected to consider the subject-specific nature of the data, their contexts of origin, and differing application scenarios.
In collections such as museums, archives, and libraries, as well as in the departments of heritage conservation, curators, documentation specialists, and IT experts are involved in this field of work. Developing and maintaining digital strategies, alongside collection concepts, is often one of the main tasks of these institutions. Therefore, they do not only concern projects that are specific in their goals and limited in available time and human resources, but also ongoing responsibilities in collection management. For example, there is often a need to adapt existing, continuously curated data sets to new usage scenarios or to keep data from completed projects accessible.
Operators of repositories and data platforms are typically highly proficient in data management. Therefore, they are not the primary target audience of this guide. However, since it is important for data producers to understand how the FAIR Principles are implemented in the interaction between them and the publication platforms, the tasks of the latter are also discussed. More on this can be found in the section Stakeholders and their Roles in the FAIR Process.