Australian Subject Gateways Forum

Minutes of the 14 May 2004 Meeting

Held in Adelaide at education.au

Welcome

The meeting was opened by Gerry White, Chief Executive Officer education.au, who welcomed the participants and emphasised the importance of a collaborative approach to issues such as interoperability and standards.

Attendees

Peter Browne, Debbie Campbell, Sue Clarke, Jane Ellen, Kerry Kilner, Jon Mason, Jenny Millea, Cath Parker, Garry Putland (chair), Barbara Rozmus (minutes), Barbara Thorsen, Jan Whitaker, Jenny White.

Guest speakers: Cath Parker (ASIC), Peter Browne (Australian Policy Online), Geoff Hendrick (EdNA Online).

Apologies

Marie-Louise Ayres, Toby Burrows, Nicole Clark, Joh Hartog.

Gateways represented

Agrigate, ATUA, AusStage, AustLit, Australian Policy Online, EdNA Online, Weblaw.

Minutes of last meeting

The minutes of the meeting on 14 November 2003 were accepted without amendments.

New business

Presentation by Cath Parker, AICTEC Standards and Interoperability Committee (ASIC)

Cath introduced ASIC as a committee of AICTEC, charged with the task of developing and maintaining a standards framework for e-learning infrastructure. Cath talked about the current barriers to such a framework and the challenges faced by ASIC. She recommended Jon Mason's presentation An overview of Government-supported e-learning activities in Australia as a good background paper on the ASIC's sphere of activities. Other relevant resources include MCEETYA's publications: Learning architecture framework: learning in an online world and Research strategy: learning in an online world.

Cath's presentation was followed by a discussion focussing on such issues as interoperability and access to standards. It was agreed that this group should provide input into the Australian standards activities via ASIC.

  • ACTION 1:
    Include the issue of the ASGF input into the Australian standards activities on the agenda for the next ASGF meeting (Barbara Rozmus).

Progress reports

The participants provided comments on their gateways' developments in the last 6 months, in addition to their written reports. A progress report for AVEL SKN was also tabled.

Agrigate - Jan Whitaker reported that Agrigate is now asking its partners for financial contributions to enable progressing the project involving adding to Agrigate interoperability and cross searching functions. It would enable users to search information collections held by other portals or gateways from within Agrigate. Agrigate's problems with spamming were also briefly discussed.

ATUA - Jane Ellen reported that the University of Melbourne is collaborating with the Noel Butlin Archive Centre at ANU on a harvesting project of recent data to extend ATUA's coverage.

AusStage - Jenny White reported that AusStage was officially launched on 1 March as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. A new content management system was recently purchased. The advance search function is being developed to accommodate item level information. AusStage may be able to report at the next ASGF meeting on trialling its data verification model.

AustLit - Kerry Kilner reported that after four years of ARC funding, AustLit has been able to self-fund its activities this year with income from subscriptions. A new service has been introduced providing a directory of events based on automatic submissions. A new regional subset of the AustLit Gateway is being developed through the Writers of Tropical Queensland project.

EdNA Online - Jenny Millea reported on the development of EdNA Online's shared information services which are now available in a range of formats - as XML, HTML, RSS and a simple copy & paste option. The metadata developments included working on the multiple application profiles within the EdNA repository, and on the relation element. After the recent review of EdNA Online's category structure, it was planned to use controlled vocabulary for general terms and thesaurus for sector specific categories.

PictureAustralia - Debbie Campbell briefly reported that in April PictureAustralia loaded its millionth image record onto the service. The service has now 36 participating institutions.

WebLaw - Barbara Thorsen reported that new records are continually added by the partner institutions. Negotiations with a law firm as a potential new partner are under way. WebLaw was recently approached with an offer of resource sharing by AARLIN, however it is not likely to proceed with it as WebLaw does not have Z39.50 capability.

Presentations

Australian Policy Online (APO) gateway - presentation by Peter Browne, Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology

Peter provided a brief outline of the development of the APO gateway, launched in April 2002. Currently 116 research centres (mostly university based) are involved. The gateway provides access to over 1400 policy related research based reports. Currently work is being done (with Australian Research Council funding) on extending the archive back to 2000, and including some major reports from 1998 and 1999. 99% of the material is on the member sites. There are 3600 subscribers to an online newsletter, and nearly 1000 "unique visits" take place each weekday. Staff of government departments are the biggest group of users, followed by academics, students and journalists.

Development of the VET Learning Object Repository - presentation by Geoff Hendrick, EdNA Online

Geoff's presentation provided background information on the EdNA Online's VET Learning Object Repository (LOR) Interoperability Project. Aiming to create a federation of VET LOR’s, the project will be standard-based, user scenario driven and easy to implement. It will provide a single LO discovery experience for end users. Establishing a set of business rules for LOR federation governance is also part of the project.

Business arising

Progress report on the ARROW project and the other ARIIC projects

Debbie Campbell briefed the meeting on progress with the four HE projects overseen by the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC):

  • Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) - lead by Monash University, the project aims to identify and test software or solutions to support best practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing;. ARROW will incorporate Creative Commons to manage content. Geoff Payne has been appointed as project manager, and contents and technical committees have been set up to facilitate further work. Debbie is a member of both committees, and is currently working on development of a national resource discovery service based on the TeraText™ software using metadata harvested from ARROW repositories. Debbie will contact the ASGF gateways individually in regard to a selective harvesting of their resources.
  • Meta Access Management System Project (MAMS) - lead by Macquarie University, the project aims to achieve integration of multiple solutions to managing authentication and authorisation; currently implemented locally with the potential for inter-institutional communication;
  • Australian Digital Theses Program Expansion and Redevelopment (ADT) - lead by the UNSW, the project aims to expand metadata and develop a federated search service covering all Australian HE theses, whether in digital form or not; to be completed by end of 2004;
  • Towards an Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) - lead by the ANU, the project aims to provide advice to Australian universities on archiving systems for digital materials; DSpace has been chosen as the software package; currently examining digital archiving models used by data grid technology, and the UK Digital Curator Centre.
  • ACTION 2:
    Invite the ADT redevelopment project manager to speak about the project at the next ASGF meeting (Barbara Rozmus).

Other business

edu.au domain names

Garry Putland briefed the meeting on the recent changes in managing edu.au domain names. As of 6 May 2004 both new and renewed registrations will cost $AUD100.00 (plus GST) for two years. education.au limited who is a registrar for the edu.au domain will soon send renewal notices to the existing edu.au domain holders. Some jurisdictions may wish to pay centrally for all their constituents’ edu.au domain names. To ensure that only education-related information is found on edu.au sites organisations must meet policy guidelines to obtain the domain, however this policy will not be applied retrospectively. More information is available on the edu.au domain website.

Regulatory environment for subject gateways

Kerry Kilner initiated a discussion on copyright issues in relation to gateway services, such as deep linking to other websites, copyright clearance for full-text materials, and copyright of metadata records. It was noted that some of those issues may be dealt with using the creative commons concept, however some may require appropriate contractual arrangements.

Jan Whitaker noted that if the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement is ratified its implications relating to IP would affect gateway projects. A good commentary about the process is provided on the Roger Clarke's Information Infrastructure Pages.

ASGF website usage Nov 2003-April 2004

Barbara Rozmus tabled a report on the ASGF website usage during the Nov 2003-April 2004 period. The key statistics for the period were presented, including visits and their breakdown, and top pages requested. The meeting participants agreed that some of the ASGF web pages should be reviewed in the near future.

Evaluation of the ASGF by the National Library

Barbara Rozmus signalled that the National Library is planning to conduct an evaluation of the ASGF arrangements to assess its relevance to the Library's current priorities. During the discussion which followed the meeting participants agreed that the following action is to take place before the evaluation is undertaken:

  • ACTION 4:
    Initiate an email discussion on terms of reference and goals for the ASGF with the view of finalising it at the next meeting (Barbara Rozmus).

Next meeting

Next meeting will be held in Sydney or Canberra in November 2004 (the exact date to be advised).

Date last verified: 19 January 2005

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