The Geisteswissenschaftliche Asset Management System (GAMS) is an OAIS-compliant asset management system for the administration, publication and long-term archiving of digital resources from all humanities subjects. It offers employees from research and teaching, but also students in projects, the possibility to manage and publish these resources in a citable way and with metadata.
GAMS was planned and developed at the Center for Information Modeling in the context of a large number of cooperative projects with partners within and outside the university, in response to the concrete requirements of university research.
The repository is fully OAIS (Open Archival Information System)-compliant and follows the FAIR data principles: "data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable".
GAMS is based on the open source project Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) and is continuously developed within the framework of cooperation projects to take specific research interests into account. For object management and data curation, a custom Java application has been developed. This Cirilo client offers functionalities that are especially relevant for large sets of objects, e.g. ingest or replace operations. It also performs numerous tasks in metadata enrichment and resource quality control.
GAMS relies on XML (eXtensible Markup Language)-based data archiving and presentation. If the data is not in an accepted XML-based standard, the center implements a conversion workflow in coordination with project partners.
For text-based content and metadata, standards used include: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects), DC (Dublin Core), METS/MODS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard/Metadata Object Description Scheme), RDF (Resource Description Framework), SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). Image files must be provided by data providers in JPEG/JPEG2000 (Joint Photographic Experts Group) or TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) standards; if required, the Center can also perform conversion here.
Data objects are stored under a persistent identifier (PID) in the form of a project-specific permalink. In addition, the GAMS infrastructure includes a handle server, which offers the possibility to create a permanent identifier in this system as well
GAMS was first certified as a trusted digital repository in alignment with the principles of the Data Seal of Approval in 2014. Since 2019 we carry the CoreTrustSeal. In 2020, GAMS was officially recognized as a CLARIN B Centre. GAMS is also registered with the Registry of Research Data Repositories.
The whole infrastructure is available as an open source software package as a contribution to DARIAH-EU at https://github.com/acdh/cirilo. Extensive documentation can be found on this site http://gams.uni-graz.at/docs.
