[again unedited, unchecked, sorry for mistakes!]

Warewick Cathro
Assistant Direct General, National Library of Australia

[sorry didn’t take very good notes for Warwick’s good talk]

“towards the australian data commons” paper on the web for reference on Australian policy in this area.

various sites/projects:

arrow: aggregates IRs in Uni repositories, 90,000 records, expects to grow rapidly. not a ‘native search service’ intended to let others use the metadata.
future: evolve, support financially by ‘austrian national data service’ (like everything else in this talk). will use shibb and poss openid.

regstry services
[interesting stuff, another project, but didn’t make any notes]

pilin – identity management
handle mirror/proxy.
tools and define requirements for a national service
national persistant identifier service.

Obsolescence notification
aons project
toolkit on sourceforge
adapters for ir software
compares profile with data from external registeries, for each registry they have built an adapter

Australian METS profile
encoding of preervation metadata
exchaging data format.
three layer model, top, generic profile, middle: content models, bottom: implementation profiles

———-

Libby Bishop (Leeds/Essex)

Timescapes: looking at relationships, family life (young people, fatherood, older people).
But also buildng a data archive in the process, some objects not born digital.

400+ participants
5000+ objects
500+ gb size.

Sustainable = Shareable + desirable.

Share:
IP sorted, resource discovery, harvestability.

Desirability
what makes people want to use this, this issue is at the service
researchers are primarly audience, but also media, policy makers, students.
Longitudinal (new term to me) e.g. track people as they move through time
needs to be multimedia: voice, video, audio.
video helps to engage you people
themematic data
reuse helps make it desirable.

Distinctive features of timescapes
answer: data (primarly)
but also: multimedia, sensitive content, complex access
Longitudinal, dynamic updating.
Intergrating of research, archive and reuse.
researchers are central to the design, they interact with repository.

Timescape Repository (at leeds), Timescapes data preserved at UK Data Archive (essex):
no point recreating a preservation service at leeds. uses digitool at leeds because mandras (?) was. digitool not open. wanted to use an existing tool at leeds rather than setup a new one.

metadata:
lots of challenges, especially in what is needed.
lots of people, expertise, and different institution.
researchers tend to be the experts and know their area,
and IR people know current practice in metadata.
looking in to how to mark up audiovisual, e.g. looking at a METS wrapper.
modifying depositor interface to repository, let people add their own metadata, with some stuff still being added by the IR staff.

showing an example of the sort of data (in a MS Word file) the researchers are collecting. need a fair bit of conversations to encourage researchers to do this. (transcript guidelines/forms)

back to sustainability:
“key strategies for sustainability”
– embedding in multiple institutions (can’t predict the future).
– build trust with researchers in what you are doing (and asking them to do) is essential, esp in long term.
– reuse!
lots of people want to be part of the project: affiliates programme. those who want to work closely have to agree to contribute their own data and reuse current data.

Summary:
researchers agreed to share and reuse data: success
waiting list of affiliates

issues:
quaility of researcher dsubmitted data, some reluctant to share, digitool multimedia support limited.
Collaboration takes time, especially across institutions.