Scientists who deal with issues of higher education governance and science policy actors in the federal government, the states and universities who are concerned with steering and service tasks have specific information needs and require quick and uncomplicated access to important documents on higher education governance. However, much of the information is currently scattered and not systematically prepared for use. The DZHW has therefore investigated the establishment of a web-based infrastructure for longer-term, comparative monitoring of developments in higher education governance in the German states as part of a feasibility study to be conducted in 2019 and 2020.
In a first step, the information needs of potential users were surveyed. To this end, a workshop was held with scientists in September 2019, and further members of this group were interviewed in winter and spring 2020 as part of a smaller series of interviews. Expert discussions were held with representatives of a total of four state ministries in the first half of 2020. In parallel, conceptual work on the relevant document types, possible metadata-based search functions, and the integration of content-analytical evaluation tools (e.g., text mining) into a document portal took place in close cooperation with the FDZ of the DZHW. In addition, it was examined to what extent a document collection already existing in the DZHW and created from different work contexts could be the basis of a document portal.
The feasibility study has clearly shown the existing need for a powerful infrastructure from the perspective of two important potential user groups. However, it has also become clear that the development and continuous operation of a web-based document portal cannot currently be realized with the resources available to the DZHW. Therefore, with the results of the study, the DZHW supports an application of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) for the third-party funded development of a research information service (FID) in the field of "Higher Education, Science and Technology Studies".
