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Monthly Project Updates

November | June | May | April

August - November activities

The final report was completed and distributed in August 2006. The project outcomes highlighted important information about general sustainability issues of data management policies and practices at the university. Meeting the needs of the researchers interviewed will take resources, and at present much is left to academic departments; often leading to either no or limited action or to 'reinventing the wheel'.

Six key issues emerged:

  1. The importance of an institution-wide strategy for eResearch.
  2. The lack of information policy and guidelines.
  3. The absence of a coordinated data management infrastructure for research.
  4. Capabilities needed by e-Researchers.
  5. A difficulty in accessing information about eResearch activity and capability.
  6. The implications of these findings for education and training.

Eight recommendations were proposed:

  1. That the University develops a strategy that broadly addresses the policy, infrastructure, support and training needs of eResearch.
  2. That the University's Research and Research Training Committee considers forming a subcommittee to provide governance for enabling eResearch at the university. This committee should have broad representation and include Information Services and eResearch leaders.
  3. That Information Services initiate a consultative process for the development of appropriate guidelines and, where relevant, policy statements, to support researchers with the management of their research data and records.
  4. To review ICT infrastructure for research, paying urgent attention to data management infrastructure.
  5. To establish a structured consultation process for eResearch support
  6. To establish an Information Exchange Strategy around eResearch.
  7. To establish a Registry of e-research expertise.
  8. To review the implications of project findings for researcher education and training.

All the above recommendations were endorsed by the Research and Research Training Committee. Information Services is currently reviewing the infrastructure needs for the support of eResearch.

The final report PDF can be accessed at: http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00002731/

June activities

We have secured approval for the extension of this project until the end of August. August will be our peak time for project knowledge transfer as we report back key learnings to all stakeholders.

Most of June has been spent collating, sorting and reporting information gathered from our participating research communities. This has involved follow up with several of the teams to check information accuracy and completeness. The national AERES project manager, Paul McNamara, visited Melbourne in the middle of the month to discuss how core information will be reported and integrated with the National project report.

Our Phase Two interventions are underway. As part of the APSR team’s consultations with the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR), IT Research Computing Services has installed an SRB (Storage Resource Broker) zone and a dummy/demonstration zone with which to federate.  The team is currently exploring access and authentication possibilities and working towards a basic demonstration of SRB data management and storage federation.  When operational, this will be used as a technical demonstration for ICCR and other eResearchers "on the ground". For more information about this development please contact the team.

In early June, Anna Shadbolt (AERES Melbourne project leader) and Dr Adrian Burton (national APSR Project Leader) were invited to participate in the neuroscience NCRIS consultation for Capability 5.2, Integrated Biological Systems. This event was hosted by the Howard Florey Institute at the University of Melbourne. This meeting provided us with considerable insights into the specific needs of this highly specialised group of researchers from around Australia.

APSR Project team member and Repository Coordinator, Eve Young, attended the Successful Repository forum on June 29. This national APSR event was hosted in Brisbane by the University of Queensland in collaboration with QULOC and RUBRIC. Eve reported that the talk around the repository space seems to be shifting its emphasis from a focus on getting the metadata right to one around the demands associated with managing increasingly large datasets and data stores. The ongoing importance of research output information management was stressed with a quotable quote from the day being: "ePrints today; Google tomorrow". Eve feels that this statement highlights the efficiency of open access repositories like ePrints (UMER) for getting research output ‘out there’ quickly. For more information about this forum, please contact Eve Young, Repository Coordinator, University of Melbourne.

The University of Melbourne has been invited to host a national APSR event in 2007. The local management team will consult with stakeholders as part of its planning for this event. More about this and more in next month’s news.

May activities

The project website went live at www.unimelb.edu.au/apsr

On 8 May we held a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Focus Session. The session provided a terrific opportunity to bring together researchers, archivists, technology personnel and technology developers to discuss issues, problems and solutions associated with managing digital assets. Two Digital Asset Management systems were demonstrated.

  • DigiTool, an ExLibris product soon to be piloted by Information Services to showcase their digital collections;
  • Mediaflux, an Arteca product that will be used to manage images in the Neuroscience MRI Computational Facility at the Howard Florey Institute.

In May we interviewed the three remaining research teams:

At the May Project Steering Committee meeting the selection criteria for Phase two projects were ratified. These criteria are:

  • The need to ensure a diverse number of discipline areas is Ms Fay Samaras represented.
  • Must have the ability to resource the intervention/support identified.
  • A willingness of the research group to participate in the process.
  • The reusability of intervention/resource within other research communities.
  • An identifiable public knowledge component (i.e. research knowledge that has external value and can be shared).

Collaboration between the Canberra and Melbourne project teams was facilitated using the Access Grid. Together we worked to develop a representation of data process classifiers. The final version of many hours of talking, thinking and drawing culminated in an impressive framework which has gone out to a number of stakeholders for comment. Team member, Markus Buchhorn, has put together the accompanying guidelines and definitions for its use; a structure that should form part of the analysis infrastructure used to report the project outputs.

April activities

The teams interviewed to date are:

Consultations are indicating varying data management capability across different research groups. There is some indication that such capabilities within any single group may vary across different stages of the data life cycle.

All groups interviewed to date identify some level of unmet need for short term and/or long term data storage.

Most groups identify varying levels of need for assistance and/or expertise in the management of their content. More investigation of needs surrounding the curation and preservation of data or research output are in progress.

Several groups are looking at how Grid Technology may facilitate remote site access and storage of their data. The understanding of this technology, its capability and its potential however, varies across groups.

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