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CLARIN-PLUS started on 1 September 2015

Submitted by Linda Stokman on

CLARIN has received two years funding from the EC for a stronger central technical hub, an improved website and for bringing in new countries and user communities. The kick-off meeting on 9 September brought most key participants together.

CLARIN-PLUS, an EC funded two-year project proposed by CLARIN, started on 1 September 2015. CLARIN-PLUS enables CLARIN to strengthen several components which are already in place, maximizing their impact with the improvements enabled by the project.

The objectives are partly attending recommendations by the High Level Expert Group’s assessment of CLARIN in 2013, which identified key areas where concentrated actions are helpful in order to ensure the broadest possible success of CLARIN. 

CLARIN-PLUS aims to accelerate the implementation and to strengthen and consolidate CLARIN in the following areas:

  1. The central (technical) hub – Extend the Service Provider Federation; improve metadata quality; tighten web-service integration; improve infrastructure gateways.
  2. The central office – Further the internal and external information platforms; work on a professional branding and a higher usability level.
  3. Partnerships with other infrastructure initiatives – Beyond existing cooperations, coordinate and implement or strengthen joint services with , GÉANT, DARIAH, , Europeana and Hathi Trust.
  4. Governance: Revise the statutes, perform a financial analysis and focus on sustainability.
  5. Outreach – Work out a concrete value proposition and use it to attract new countries, centres and users; demonstrate the potential of CLARIN to new user groups.

This project will help to adjust the balance between the national CLARIN consortia and centres, and CLARIN ERIC, and will reinforce the development of CLARIN as a robust European infrastructure.

Principal applicants are, besides CLARIN ERIC itself, the CLARIN centres in Prague, Copenhagen and Tübingen. Also several other CLARIN Centres are participating either via secondments or by hosting workshops.

The kick-off meeting in Utrecht on 9 September 2015 brought representatives from all work packages and participating centres together and gave the CLARIN directors and work package leaders the opportunity to present an overview and to discuss critical aspects of the project. The meeting was chaired by Franciska de Jong, CLARIN ERIC’s new executive director, who will coordinate the project as a whole.