Workshop Programme

Our conference is supplemented by a programme of workshops led by members of our community. These events must be booked separately from the conference.   

Tickets are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. You can register for multiple workshops, provided their schedules don't overlap.

Please note: Attendance is in-person only and you do not have to attend the conference to register for the workshops.   

IDCC27 Workshop Programme, Monday 16 February   

All times are in Central European Time (CET). 

Tuesday, 9 February 

Friday, 12 February 

Please note: Registration opens 30 minutes before the start of the workshop. 

IDCC27 Workshop Summaries 

Workshop 1 - Collaborative by design: Using the Business Model Canvas to critically assess sustainability of research data services by GESIS 

Digital curation depends on a growing ecosystem of research data services and infrastructures, yet many communities still struggle to turn promising prototypes into robust, long-term offerings. As the OECD has noted almost ten years ago, this also holds true for many repositories. Service providers themselves must therefore lay the foundation for such sustainability. This full-day interactive workshop is aimed at infrastructure providers and uses the Business Model Canvas to examine the viability of research data services. 

Through short input presentations and structured breakout sessions, participants will shape a service’s value proposition, user personas, KPIs, and funding streams. Rather than assuming that all infrastructures should operate as market-driven businesses, participants will critically reflect on when business-case thinking is helpful and when it might need adapting for mission-driven, publicly funded, and community-governed contexts. 

Workshop 2 - Training the Trainers: Scaling metadata literacy through open training resources by CLOSER & UCL 

This full-day interactive workshop introduces Understanding Metadata, a suite of open training resources developed by CLOSER to support metadata literacy. The online courses provide a structured learning pathway from research data and core metadata concepts through to metadata entities, relationships, and practical approaches to metadata creation. 

The workshop is aimed at research data managers, data stewards, librarians, metadata specialists, repository staff, trainers, and others who support research communities. It is suitable for practitioners with varying levels of metadata experience, from those wishing to strengthen their understanding of metadata concepts to those involved in developing training and support activities. 

Workshop 3 - Mindfulness as a complementary competence in data stewardship: theory, practice and lessons learned by Haute Ecole de Gestion de Genève // HESSO 

This half-day workshop explores Mindful Data Stewardship as a complementary competence for Data Stewardship and Digital Curation. It builds on the experience of a one-day workshop delivered in vocational training in Research Data Stewardship in Switzerland and a peer-reviewed publication on the same topic. 

The workshop is not intended to provide a condensed mindfulness training session. Instead, it takes a meta-perspective on the topic. The format will combine short presentations, selected examples from the previous workshops, guided reflection, small-group discussion and practical exercises plus plenary exchange. We will also discuss the relationship between consciousness, the mind, mindfulness and Artificial Intelligence.

Workshop 4 - Curators in the loop: human-centred artificial intelligence for the digital curation of cultural heritage collections by ISCTE 

The prevailing framing of “human-in-the-loop” collapses to the curator as reviewer of model output, understating the interpretive labour, disciplinary craft, and community accountability that curation practice carries. Responding to the IDCC27 theme, “FAIR DO’s: Centring People in the Stewardship and Curation of Digital Objects,” this workshop convenes work that pushes past oversight toward a richer account of curator-AI collaboration — as a design problem, an empirical research problem, and a governance problem. 

For more information please visit workshop website: https://sites.google.com/iscte-iul.pt/cair-2027/ 

Submission platform: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cair2027 

Workshop 5 - From plan to practice: leveraging machine-actionable DMPs in active research tools and infrastructure by RSpace 

Machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs) offer the capacity to turn the DMP from a static compliance document into a resource that automatically drives research data management across a project’s life. Recent work in the OSTrails project, including the Plan-Track-Assess pathways and the maDMP API specification built on the RDA DMP Common Standard, has matured the standards and services needed to make DMP tools interoperable. Similarly, tools like RSpace and repository platforms have incorporated workflows involving maDMPs that streamline the reporting of research outputs. However, DMPs go beyond an anchor to a research project; they can be leveraged by tools and services to enable researchers to automatically adhere to the agreed-on data management policy and guidance. That's where daily used active research tools like electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) and others could come into play. 

This workshop moves the conversation from specification to practice. Building directly on the maDMP initiatives by the RDA, participating tools, and the OSTrails project, it brings together tool providers and developers (spanning DMP, active-research, and infrastructure tools), infrastructure operators, and research data managers and curators. Together, participants will explore existing integration scenarios, identify friction points and gaps in the current standards and APIs, and leave with blueprints and ideas for leveraging maDMPs in active research tools and their research data workflows. 

Workshop 6 - Curating chaos: rapid-response archiving with the Data Rescue Project by Data Rescue Project 

The Data Rescue Project (DRP) formed in February 2025 as a grassroots volunteer community during a moment of urgency to enable the rapid-response capture of thousands of datasets from US federal websites in response to various actions of the federal government. DRP required extensive coordination and a structured curation workflow to ensure rescued datasets were thoroughly documented and as complete as possible. 

This workshop will begin with providing context about the project and the challenges we continue to face. We will then turn to our dataset rescue process and curation workflow. Attendees will be guided through a hands-on walkthrough of our curation workflow, built on the Data Curation Network's CURATE(D) Framework and incorporating preservation tools such as ICPSR’s Data Lumos. Regarding metadata, critical given how difficult it can be to trace a dataset back to its original repository once it has been removed or relocated, attendees will learn about the infrastructure powering our data rescue tracker and portal. We will close by discussing future directions, both for the Data Rescue Project and for data rescue efforts more broadly. We will invite feedback from attendees on a draft toolkit designed to support organizations in rapid-curation efforts. 

Workshop 7 - Improving FAIRability of digital objects with metadata using RO-Crate by The University of Manchester 

RO-Crate provides a mechanism for packaging research outputs together with structured metadata following the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This supports machine-actionability, reproducibility and allows for a range of integrations, such as with provenance and legal and organisational frameworks. RO-Crate enables the interlinking of methods, data, and outputs with the outcomes of a project or a piece of work, even where distributed across repositories. 

RO-Crate is an approach to creating FAIR Digital Objects that has been adopted in research infrastructures around the world, in domains spanning life science, health, earth science, materials science, language, and cultural heritage. 

This workshop will provide a domain-agnostic interactive introduction to RO-Crate, assuming no prior knowledge of the technology. First, you will learn how RO-Crate metadata is structured by constructing the metadata for a simple dataset. You will then explore an ecosystem of tools that integrate RO-Crate behind the scenes to enable reproducibility of computational workflows and the production of FAIR Digital Objects. Finally, we will showcase other real-world uses of RO-Crate to illustrate the many possibilities for applying it in your own projects. 

Workshop 8 - Reaching maturity in RDM and FAIR practices through organizational co-learning and curious dialogue by CSC - IT Center for Science 

This workshop provides participants with practical methods to advance FAIR data stewardship and organisational data management maturity, extending the focus beyond FAIR metrics at project level. The format combines introduction to the methodology with guided group discussions and maturity assessments. The workshop welcomes data stewards, research support, IT and security personnel from research organisations. 

Achieving FAIR data management maturity is fundamentally an organisational challenge involving people, processes and collaboration. Data stewards may encounter resistance to changing established ways of working due to differing legal, security and data protection concerns, or simply due to misunderstandings or lack of vision. When organisations jointly recognize the value of FAIR, steps towards maturity improvement have been taken. 

The workshop introduces a co-creation approach developed through research data management (RDM) consultations conducted by Fairdata services in Finland with HEIs in 2025-2026. The method brings together expertise from different professional backgrounds to build a shared understanding of the prerequisites for good data management and FAIR maturity.