One reason why the re-use of qualitative data is still the exception, is the lack of a sustainable and interlinked infrastructure, which develops services in close cooperation with the specific research communities and offers support and access to data sharing opportunities. Researchers who are willing to deposit their data often struggle to identify a reliable research data center that offers satisfactory conditions for archiving and disseminating their data, just as secondary users often cannot find appropriate data, or have to search several data catalogues with different interfaces and search approaches.

To overcome this fragmentation, to promote access and re-use of qualitative data the Consortium for the Social, Behavioural, Educational, and the Economic Sciences (KonsortSWD), part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) in Germany, aims at creating a community-centred federated network of several RDCs for qualitative data: The Qualidata Network (QualidataNet). We will present our idea to replace the fragmentation landscape with a coordinated, user and service-oriented infrastructure. The presentation will focus on the current version of our cooperatively developed core metadata set and controlled vocabulary for the various aspects concerning qualitative data, which take the existing DDI products into account and explore new developments.