PARTHENOS has collected information about existing collaboration relations between partners and persons/institutions outside the project. The information is available in a publicly accessible table. In addition we have conducted a small number of interviews in order to give examples of the purposes and the outcomes of such collaboration.
The first interview is with Dr Ulrike Wuttke, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (FHP). She was the leader of the task that creates PARTHENOS training materials, which are bundled online within the PARTHENOS Training Suite, and organises training activities. Ulrike Wuttke was also responsible for the PARTHENOS eHumanities and eHeritage Webinar Series.
UW: We have had several outside partners for the PARTHENOS Webinar Series; in particular we have been partnering for specific content for the Training Suite, but also for specific training activities.
Why do you collaborate with persons outside of the project?
UW: First of all we seek collaboration in order to improve the quality of training materials, especially to diversify its content. From external collaborators we may get different content, especially content that we ourselves would not have been able to produce. Secondly, the collaboration is at the same time used as a dissemination channel: this way we are able to tell other persons that PARTHENOS exists and maybe make them interested in using PARTHENOS results, not only training results but also other results. For them, producing materials with PARTHENOS is also a form of dissemination, so this is clearly a win-win-situation. We also partner for Training events with other research infrastructures and projects.
How did you get in contact with relevant collaborators?
UW: Some collaborators were identified in conferences on relevant topics, others were known to us beforehand and contacted by email, and finally we also searched for expertise on the web and found references.
What came out of it?
UW: We had an example where we contacted Dr Paul Schultze-Motel, who is very famous for the Helmholtz Open Science webinars, to seek his advice. He was actually very pleased to be consulted as an expert, and we got some very good input for our webinars, so it has been a very rewarding way of working and even contributed to dissemination.
It has proven very beneficial to have both inside and outside experts. And we are going to use the same method also after PARTHENOS if the occasion arrives again. Not least the fact that the results can be used for dissemination purposes, often by both parties, provides a win-win situation. As an example PARTHENOS has collaborated with EUROPEANA on several occasions and reused some of their materials such as for instance the EUROPEANA Impact Playbook and several of their videos – this has resulted in a win-win situation where PARTHENOS gets more content and EUROPEANA gets visibility of their materials.
Very often, training, dissemination and outreach go hand in hand and there are advantages on both sides. This is actually necessary as most of the interesting people are very busy, so they need to see the advantages for themselves. So, we will be happy to do this again.