A friend was working on an amateur history project and I was helping them with the database. I figured that I'd start with the standards among professional hist

A friend was working on an amateur history project and I was helping them with the database. I figured that I'd start with the standards among professional historians for databases - people, place and event metadata; fields; schema, etc. That way my friend's work eventually could find a much broader audience, both among contemporaries and across time; there would be a much broader set of tools my friend could use (likely even existing FOSS databases); and of course I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. I asked a few professional academic historians - and to my shock they said no such thing existed. They seemed to think I was confused about the need and accepted that everything was done ad hoc as it always had been. One suggested adapting a proprietary online genealogy database to the needs of the project (which was not genealogy nor even particularly focused on people). It was depressing, thinking of the massive missed opportunity across academia to share and utilize their data much more efficiently. Imagine the state of software development if developers managed their work product the same way, in ad hoc hacked together silos on their personal computers, rather than through Github and the Internet That was a few years ago, so I hope things have changed.