This year, the NETWORKSHOP conference celebrated its 35th anniversary. Organized by the HUNGARNET Association between March 31 and April 2, 2026, the event, the most prestigious domestic conference on computer networking and applied information technology in higher education, public education, research, and public collections, was hosted by the University of Debrecen.

The multi-day program featured presentations, interactive sessions, tutorials, and mini-workshops, as well as lightning talks. Key focal points of the conference included, among others, “Data Repository Systems and Networks,” “Long-Term Preservation and Web Archiving,” “Major Trends in the Application of AI: Service Developments in Content Delivery,” and “New Network Technology Solutions.” The RDC team gave one presentation and one interactive session.

In her presentation titled “What is DDI, and How Will It Increase the Visibility of the Repository of RDC in the Centre for Social Sciences?”, Júlia Egyed-Gergely introduced the services of the RDC, the RDC Repository, and the Voices of the 20th Century Archive, as well as the RDC’s development plans and opportunities for joining international networks. One of the RDC’s key objectives for 2026 is to increase the visibility of its research data and to ensure that the research materials it holds are more widely discoverable and accessible. A key element of this is strengthening the relationship between CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) and RDC, and integrating the infrastructure into the CESSDA Data Catalogue. The presentation addressed the technical requirements and preparatory steps for this, as well as the necessary international Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata set and complex ecosystem. The presentation also discussed the best practices and research data management system of the largest Finnish social science data archive, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive, with whose staff RDC staff are collaborating on a joint project, and whose infrastructure we were able to explore in person during a 10-day field visit in the spring of 2025 funded by the National Research, Development And Innovation Office.

In their interactive presentation titled “Treasure Hunt in the ARP Data Repository,” Enikő Meiszterics, Gabriella Virág, and Júlia Egyed-Gergely discussed the ARP Data Repository (jointly operated and supported by RDC, the Institute for Computer Science and Control, and Wigner Research Centre for Physics) in scientific and interdisciplinary research as well as in market applications, the potential inherent in data reuse, and the vast data resources available in the ARP repositories. During the interactive presentation, the audience had the opportunity to actively participate in the event; after learning about ARP’s search capabilities, they could complete various tasks and win valuable prizes. The audience could try out ARP’s internal search engine and the ARP Federated Search service, which allowed them to explore the funniest ARP collection, access the University of Debrecen’s most popular dataset, and search for data in their own research fields. The bravest and fastest participants were even able to present their search methods and results.

Further information is available on the conference website. 

Photos: Zoltán Tóth (SZTAKI)
Cover image: Júlia Egyed-Gergely (RDC, CSS)