Project SHIELD: Science & Heritage Infrastructure for Enduring Long-term Data (2026)

• Applicant: Lambert Heller
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 581851694

Project SHIELD strengthens the long-term resilience of endangered scientific and technological research datasets through decentralized long-term data retention and preservation infrastructures. Building on the expertise of TIB, Safeguarding Research and Culture (SRC), and the Data Rescue Project (DRP), SHIELD develops a federated, peer-to-peer architecture based on BitTorrent v2 and open standards for metadata, provenance, and curation. The project focuses on rescuing large-scale, high-value datasets from US agencies (e.g., NIST, NREL, EPA) that are essential to German and European research but at risk of loss due to funding cuts and political instability. SHIELD will implement a scalable institutional backend, integrate with existing long-term preservation systems (TIB, NFDI consortia, EOSC), and enable third parties to participate in distributed data rescue efforts. The result will be a sustainable, verifiable, and openly networked infrastructure for preserving critical data in Science and Technology.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Angelina Kraft; Michelle Lindlar