Source: Michèle Robrecht
From May 19 to 22, 2026, the library community gathered for this year’s BiblioCon at the Estrel Congress Center in Berlin. Under the motto “Analog Meets Algorithm,” the largest library conference in the German-speaking world focused on current developments in digitization, artificial intelligence, and modern information infrastructures. This blog post provides insights into Coscine’s participation and the discussions surrounding research data management, libraries, and digital infrastructures.
BiblioCon: A Gathering Place for the Community
BiblioCon was organized by the Berufsverband Information Bibliothek e. V. (BIB) in collaboration with the Verein Deutscher Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare e. V. (VDB). Several thousand experts from libraries, universities, research institutions, and the field of research data management gathered in Berlin to discuss current developments and future topics.
Libraries & Coscine
BiblioCon demonstrated just how closely libraries and research infrastructures are now interconnected. Topics such as data sovereignty, open science, research data management, artificial intelligence, and modern library services highlighted the central role that modern infrastructure platforms play in academia today.
With regard to FDM, Coscine serves as an important point of contact between libraries and researchers, particularly since the review of storage space requests for FDM:Storage.nrw and Coscine’s first-level support at the participating universities are often carried out by library staff from the respective FDM teams.
Approximately four petabytes of research data on FDM:Storage.nrw are now managed via Coscine. This corresponds to a data volume of around 790 billion e-book pages. They are described by 291 metadata profiles. In addition, 18 requests for publication consultations have already been submitted via Coscine to the libraries of the participating universities. These figures underscore the growing importance of structured data management, reusability, and long-term availability of research data.
Interactive poster invites participation
The interactive poster “Coscine – the FDM platform connecting libraries and researchers” piqued the curiosity of conference participants. The well-known Coscine workflow diagram was deliberately displayed without labels. Interested attendees could independently assign the individual steps to their appropriate places and thus actively follow the workflow.
The poster’s interactive approach sparked many in-depth discussions: Assigning the workflow steps gave conference participants who had no prior experience with Coscine their first interactive introduction to the platform. Once participants had grasped the Coscine workflow, related topics such as the integration of RDMO, artificial intelligence, or other FDM tools naturally arose. This led to numerous discussions with university libraries and non-university research institutions from all over Germany. In particular, work on interfaces to other FDM tools is shaping the current development of Coscine—the discussions at BiblioCon confirmed the importance of this focus for FDM staff in libraries.
Outlook: Data publication as a future core function
Another central topic of discussion was the future interface with DataPublication.nrw for data publication. Together with the University of Bonn, Coscine is working until 2029 on establishing a data flow between Coscine and the research data repository DataPublication.nrw.
Once the repository is available, Coscine users will be able to send publication requests directly from the Coscine platform via email to DataPublication.nrw, including information on the respective research project. The automatic transfer of complete projects or resources is then planned for 2027. In the long term, the goal is to enable the transfer of individually compiled data packages directly from Coscine to DataPublication.nrw for publication there.
Learn more
Would you like to be regularly informed about news related to Coscine? Then visit the Coscine website and subscribe to the Coscine newsletter to stay up to date once a month.
If you have any questions about Coscine or research data management, the FDM team at RWTH Aachen University is happy to assist you at any time.
Responsible for the content of this article are Michèle Robrecht and Arlinda Ujkani.
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