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Flinders University: Reformatting the AusStage dataset to support access and reuse by researchers

Flinders University has successfully completed the ANDS-funded Seeding the Commons project: “Reformatting the AusStage dataset to support access and reuse by researchers.”

The key achievements this project produced are:

The nationally significant AusStage dataset in a flattened, machine-readable, standards compliant format to support data re-use by researchers (RDF with a Sparql end point)
A process to regularly update the dataset
Draft research management policies produced and moved through Flinders University’s policy ratification processes.

A description of the AusStage dataset project can be seen on Research Data Australia.

A description of the project and contact information can be found on the ANDS website and and more information is available on the AusStage website: http://www.ausstage.edu.au.

The RDF dataset is (temporarily) here: http://rdf.csem.flinders.edu.au/joseki/sparql.html

Flinders University: Automated measurement of the responses of wildlife populations to climate change

Flinders University has successfully completed the ANDS-funded Data Capture Project: “Automated measurement of the responses of wildlife populations to climate change.”

The key achievements this project produced are:

An operational system for cleansing sleepy lizard behavioural ecology data collected by Professor Mike Bull and his research team
Draft research management policies produced and moved through Flinders University’s policy ratification processes
An operational institutional research data metadata store (ReDBox).

A description of the sleepy lizard data collection project can be seen on Research Data Australia.
A description of the project and contact information can be found on the ANDS website.

University of Melbourne: Seeding the Commons (SC02)

The University of Melbourne has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: “Seeding the Commons” (SC02).

The key achievements this project produced are:

Identified and documented over 500 existing research datasets, using manual and automated workflows into the University Metadata Store and Research Data Australia. Excluding specific research institutes, this is by far the greatest number of records submitted to Research Data Australia by an institution, and exposes datasets including Archaeology (eight), Australian Government (41), Biochemistry (seven), Zoology (11), Psychology (14), Plant Biology (32), Neuroscience (17) research areas, among many.
Developed a university wide research data and records management policy and tools for supporting the implementation of this policy (see http://www.imas.unimelb.edu.au/research_data_management) .
Established an integrated research data management helpdesk, supported by an integrated website that aims to connect researchers and research administrators with policy information, tools, services and training. A new website will launch in early 2012.
Developed and delivered a variety of information, outreach and training materials for internal stakeholders, has been made on the ANDS Community Noticeboard.

The project has provided tangible outputs, which illustrates what can be achieved with the provision of targeted resources. The University of Melbourne will fund key personnel in this project for a further 12 months and hope to grow the service further in 2013. Ongoing promotion of Research Data Australia will form part of outreach and information sessions across the University’s integrated research data management service.

A description of the project and contact information can be found on the ANDS website.

This project was led by Anna Shadbolt on behalf of Philip Kent, University Librarian.

CSIRO: Seeding the Commons: Enabling CSIRO’s Biological Collections for the AR

CSIRO has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: “Seeding the Commons: Enabling CSIRO’s Biological Collections for the ARDC”.

The key achievements this project produced are:

A survey tool was developed and used to identify biological collections managed by CSIRO that are potentially of significance to the broader research community and to enhance the visibility of those collections. The survey tool was released for re-use via the ANDS Community Bulletin Board.

More than 22 collection records, 17 Party Person records and two Activity records have been published via Research Data Australia (RDA). This will enhance the visibility of biological collections within CSIRO as well as to the broader research community.

A crosswalk between Darwin Core Simple and RIF-CS metadata schema was developed and released for re-use via the ANDS Community Bulletin Board. Mapping of Darwin Core metadata also provided a detailed analysis of the schema and interoperability with other systems such as CSIRO’s Data Access Portal, RDA’s RIF-CS schema and the ALA’s preferred profile for Darwin Core
The project investigated the integration of a number of open source tools into a platform that supported the management of physical biological specimens. Two instances of the Specify 6 platform, a production server and a development server were deployed on CSIRO maintained and supported infrastructure. A sample configuration guide for how CSIRO implemented an instance of the Specify 6 tool for the Australian National Insect Collection and the Australian National Wildlife Collection will be released via the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) website following the scheduled update of the site.
The information gathered through the project enables a clearer picture of the data management practices and capabilities within the organisation with regards to biological collections and their level of maturity for sharing with the external research community.

A description of the CSIRO biological collections can be seen on Research Data Australia.
A description of the project and contact information can be found on the ANDS website.

This project was jointly led by Tricia Kelly and John Morrissey from CSIRO Information Management and Technology.

La Trobe University: CMSS RLI Metadata Capture and Publication

La Trobe university has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: "CMSS RLI Metadata Capture and Publication".

The project leveraged the existing ANDS services to support Australian researchers use of instrumentation at the La Trobe Centre for Materials and Surface Science facility (CMSS). The major outcome from the researchers' point of view is that the system provides a facility to store their datasets, describe them, and easily share them online, with persistent identifiers so that they can be cited conveniently.
Furthermore, the new developed system has also provided a platform for the CMSS to publish data acquired from several standard materials. Finally, the system is also able to expose these datasets to the wider world through the Research Data Australia portal.

A description of the La Trobe University data capture project collections can be seen on Research Data Australia:
The code and user documentation developed as part of this project is available at http://code.google.com/p/ands-la-trobe/

The outcomes of this project were made possible through the hard work of Dr. Mark Kosten and his teams from La Trobe eResearch Office.

Watering the garden for the seeds to grow: building Swinburne research data management capability

Swinburne University of Technology has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: "Watering the garden for the seeds to grow: building Swinburne research data management capability".

The key achievements this project produced are:

A local guide for research data description, covering appropriate metadata schema and ontologies. More information and documents are available here.
Completed framework and materials for a data audit of all active Category 1 research income grants.
Swinburne extensively tested the ReDBox software and analysed its suitability for the institution’s needs: <http://code.google.com/p/redbox-mint/>
Created a research data management toolkit and training materials for Library staff
A selection of datasets described and contributed to Research Data Australia

There is a link to Swinburne’s research data website.

Swinburne’s current data collection can be seen on Research Data Australia.

A description of the project and contact information can be found here on the ANDS website.

This project was completed by Rebecca Parker and Terrence Bennett and was led by Teula Morgan at Swinburne University of Technology Library

Monash University Seeding the Commons project

Monash University has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: "Monash University Seeding the Commons project".

The project aimed to identify and describe research data collections arising from publicly funded research, and to showcase these collections by contributing information about them to Research Data Australia (RDA). As a result of this project:

60+ Monash researchers have been provided with an additional channel to promote their research, including showcasing their work to new generalist and cross-disciplinary audiences.
The in-depth nature of the interviews has also enabled the Library to learn more about researchers’ data management practices and needs.
The project has also led to a dramatic increase in the participation of Library staff in data management activities.

Monash University’s data collection records, including those contributed by the Seeding the Commons project, can be seen on Research Data Australia

Many of the project's templates and workflows are already available on the website: <http://www.researchdata.monash.edu.au/collections-project/> Updated and new documentation will be added in 2012, and the project team are happy to receive inquiries about any aspects of the project.

The outcomes of this project were made possible through the work of Sue Clarke, Sam Searle and teams from Monash University Library.

National eResearch Architecture Taskforce Projects report

At eResearch Australasia 2011, Paul Coddington, NeAT Program Manager, presented the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NeAT) Projects report, about the 14 projects undertaken as part of this ANDS-ARCS co-funded initiative. The projects covered a wide range of research activities and delivered robust and enduring advances in research tools.

A number of the NeAT Projects developed eResearch infrastructure tools that: enable the capture of rich descriptions; make new data available; and integrate data to enable richer exploration. This report highlights the outcomes and benefits of all 14 NeAT projects, which finished in mid-to-late 2011.

The National eResearch Architecture Taskforce was established by the Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council (AeRIC) under the NCRIS Platforms for Collaboration Investment Plan. The funding and implementation support for NeAT was invested within the Australian National Data Service and the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS), to ensure that a broad skill base was available.

If you would like a hardcopy of the report please email contact@ands.org.au or alternatively the digital copy is available at here.

Edith Cowan University: Data Management Plan and Policy

Edith Cowan University in Western Australia has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: “Data Management Plan and Policy”

The key achievements this project produced are:

A draft research data management policy and plan for the university
Data management training to be included in the Graduate Research Induction Program
Descriptions of 16 publicly available research datasets produced by Edith Cowan University research in Research Data Australia

A description of the project and contact information can be found on the ANDS website here.

The outcomes of this project were made possible through the work of Julia Gross, Constance Wiebrands and David Howard from the Edith Cowan University Library.

Monash University: Capture and Publication of Data on the History of Adoption

Monash University e-Research Centre has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: “Capture and Publication of Data on the History of Adoption”.

The key achievements this project produced are:

The process of capturing stories and associated metadata from the website submission form and storing them in a Data Management system.
The process of generating a story web page with attached story transcript, metadata files in MODS and DC formats and search tags.
The process of ‘publishing’ a story to ARROW, the Monash Library public repository.

A description of the history of adoption data collection can be seen on Research Data Australia

This project was led by Prof. Marian Quartly, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies and Anthony Beitz at Monash e-Research Centre. Staff at the Australian Catholic University were also collaborators.

Project summary handout (PDF 714KB)

The University of Wollongong: Identifying and locating UOW data sets

The University of Wollongong has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: "Identifying and locating UOW data sets to seed the Australian Research Data Commons and the development of a supporting research data management policy"

This project formed an important component of the "DataWise" strategic project. The key achievements and outcomes this Seeding the Commons project produced are:

35 collections loaded to RDA from UOW. These were identified from Australian Competitive Grants from 2005-2010. There are 404 successful ACGs which contained potential data collections.
Temporary infrastructure of project registration, metadata collection and data storage have been established.
To ensure the continuation of the benefits from the ANDS Seeding the Commons Project, a Data Management framework has been developed at UOW.
Draft Data Management Guidelines have been prepared.
Policy document written: "Persistent Identifiers for UOW objects used to populate Research Data Australia". This covers keys and object IDs.

This is a link to the project page at University of Wollongong eResearch website: http://www.uow.edu.au/research/eresearch/datamanagement/projects/UOW087138.html

The data collections can be seen on Research Data Australia.

This project was managed by Matthew Perry and the project work was carried out by Carolyn Norris and Elaine Gully. Their contact details are here.

The Centre for Health Informatics at UNSW: An International Antibiotic-Resistance Gene Cassette Database

The Centre for Health Informatics at UNSW has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: “An International Antibiotic-Resistance Gene Cassette Database”

The key achievements this project produced are:

Published a free on-line repository of the hundreds of known antibiotic resistance gene cassettes.
Established a web service through which microbiologists can submit cassette array sequences and receive an accurate cassette names based on predictions made by our (existing) computational system and knowledge base.
Allow people to submit new cassettes to be reviewed by staff at the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and for inclusion in the knowledge base.
Created tools to keep track of submission status, update submission, and publish them.
Users in 6 countries in less than 6 months since launch.

This is a link to the Repository of Antibiotic resistance Cassettes database online: http://www2.chi.unsw.edu.au:8080/rac/

A description of the MPPDA data collection can be seen on Research Data Australia.

This project was jointly led by Dr. Guy Tsafnat and Dr. Sally Partridge at the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Westmead Hospital.
The software development was carried out by Intersect Australia Limited.

Project summary handout (PDF 720KB)

Flinders University: Reforming the Movies

Flinders University has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: Reforming the Movies: the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. database

The project made available a database comprising 35 000 digital images of documents digitised from a microfilm copy of the general correspondence files of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA), Hollywood's trade association, covering the period from 1922 to 1939. Along with other, ongoing, ANDS-funded projects, the MPPDA project also had institution-wide outcomes for Flinders University, including the drafting of research data management policy and input to development of research data storage infrastructure.

This is a link to the MPPDA database online: http://mppda.flinders.edu.au/

A description of the MPPDA data collection can be seen on Research Data Australia.

The MPPDA project was led by Professor Richard Maltby. He plans to present on the project at the eResearch Australasia conference in Melbourne in November.

There is a description of the project, including contact details for the project team here.

The University of South Australia: Taking Australian Architectural and Built Environment Records into the Commons

The University of South Australia has successfully completed the ANDS-funded project: Taking Australian Architectural and Built Environment Records into the Commons.

The project was based at the Architecture Museum at the University of South Australia: http://www.unisa.edu.au/artarchitecturedesign/architecturemuseum/default.asp

It made metadata about the Architecture Museum's collections widely available online: http://www.metatecture.unisa.edu.au/public/

The Architecture Museum collections can also be seen on Research Data Australia.

The University of South Australia developed a system they called 'Metatecture' to facilitate the creation and publication of metadata. This software is available for download at the Sourceforge project site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/metatecture/

There is a description of the project, including contact details for the project team here.