Don’t let your data be a needle in a haystack – efficient metadata curation for optimal findability

Collaboration Coffee
In session Collaboration Coffees No. 1 , Sept. 3, 2025, 11:00 – 12:00
Exact timing: 11:00 – 12:00
Room info: Library Meetingroom , Big Meetingroom , Small Meetingroom

Berthold, Maximilian¹ , Vogel, J.¹ , Reineke, A.¹ , Pörsch, A.² , Deller, J.¹

There is an ever-increasing amount of data, projects, and publications hosted across several platforms coming from different disciplines. For one part, funding agencies require that as many results as possible are made available to be accessible even after a project is finished. Furthermore, there should be an intrinsic motivation by scientists to make their data as well described and easily findable as possible. Thoroughly described metadata is key to increase findability and subsequently increase reusability, which can increase the impact of one’s own research. Such metadata can be rated using the FAIR principles. However, only less than half of all scientists have ever heard, and even less used them to efficiently describe their research data. Consequently, metadata found on scientific repositories shows often strongly varying levels of completeness, or is simply faulty. There are various guidelines and initiatives led by e.g. research institutes to improve metadata quality, as it really is as famously noted “A love letter to the future”. We, the National Centre for Environmental and Nature Conservation Information based at the German Environment Agency, aim to integrate Germany’s scattered data and information landscape on environmental and nature knowledge into one central access point. We have encountered a wide range of metadata in both quality and accessibility, as well as technical systems used to distribute them. We aim to connect and consult different actors in this field, as part of our mission. Here, we want to invite anyone interested in learning how to write metadata according to FAIR criteria, spotting the difference in metadata quality, or just like to chat about newest initiatives with respect to (meta-)data availability. This collaboration coffee aims to i) give a short introduction to FAIR and open-data, ii) discuss current advances and challenges of sharing your work as openly as possible, and iii) work on To-Do’s and To-Don’ts about creating and documenting metadata to help make scientific work FAIR. We will give examples for best practices and will discuss the variety of available formats on how to share your metadata efficiently. We would like to strengthen networking and collaboration across platforms, institutions and disciplines being open-minded about the diverse needs of the community. Further possible outcomes can be joint projects within the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) and NFDI framework, where we are collaboration partners.