Australian Subject Gateways Forum

Minutes of the 22 November 2004 meeting

Held in Sydney at University of New South Wales

Welcome

The meeting was opened by Andrew Wells, University Librarian, UNSW, who welcomed the participants and wished them a productive meeting.

Attendees

Marie-Louise Ayres, Peter Browne, Debbie Campbell, Sue Clarke, Jenny Millea, Sue Owen, Barbara Rozmus (minutes), Kerrie Talmacs (chair), Barbara Thorsen, Andrew Wells, Jan Whitaker

Guest speakers: Fiona Bathgate (ADT Redevelopment Project Officer), Judith Pearce (National Library of Australia)

Apologies

Sten Christensen, Nicole Clark, Jillian Dellit, Jane Ellen, Joh Hartog, Kerry Kilner, Jenny White

Gateways represented

ADT, Agrigate, ATUA, APO, EdNA Online, MusicAustralia, Weblaw

Minutes of last meeting

The minutes of the meeting on 14 May 2004 were accepted without amendments.

New business

Presentation on the ADT Redevelopment Project by Fiona Bathgate, ADT Redevelopment Project Officer

Fiona provided an outline of the ADT redevelopment project in the light of the ADT program's original goals and objectives, and its perceived strengths and weaknesses. The redevelopment, based on the one-stop-shop concept, involves redevelopment of the metadata repository, revision of the metadata scheme, support of OAI-PMH and Z39.50 compliance. Further content development will be done by importing the NBD thesis records, and retrospective digitisation. It is planned that the redeveloped ADT will go live in the first quarter of 2005.

The issues brought up in the discussion following Fiona's presentation included types of theses in scope for the ADT (Masters and PhD degrees only to preserve the research focus), and file formats (the current file format is PDF only). The ASGF members were invited to provide input into the revision of the ADT metadata scheme available at http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/thesis/adt-ADT/info/ADT_Metadata_V6.doc.

Sue Owen informed the meeting about the 8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses & Dissertations (http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/thesis/etd2005/conference.html) which will be hosted by the UNSW on 27-30 September 2005.

Progress reports

Issues arising from Progress Reports

The participants highlighted the most important developments for their gateways within the last six months.

Agrigate - Jan Whitaker reported on the sustained high usage of Agrigate. The current behind the scenes work focuses on interoperability and cross-searching developments.

Australia Dancing - Marie-Louise Ayres reported for Michelle Potter that Australia Dancing, which is a mainstream NLA service, encompasses at present 350 subjects, 250 people, and 1,800 resources. The service is very well used, with 150,000 visits registered last year and over 50% of use coming from overseas. Michelle manages both the collecting and access aspects of the service.

Australian Policy Online (APO) - Peter Browne reported that the redesigned APO website, released in July 2004, attracted a growing number of visitors, especially during the elections. The archive project, now almost completed, has resulted in over 2,000 reports from 2000-01 added to the gateway. The APO received a second ARC Linkage grant of $114,000 to bring in print based materials. Work is now being done on reports on traffic redirected to partner website from the APO site.

EdNA Online - Jenny Millea provided the relevant information in her written report. It covered the Shared Information Services, Distributed Search Manager, collaborative workspace, and the recent grant applications.

MusicAustralia - Marie-Louise Ayres reported that MusicAustralia is in the final phase of its development. MARC is used for resource description and MAPS for description of people and organisations. The audio delivery systems for MusicAustralia partners have been developed. Trails for curatorial highlights have been constructed by using an in-house developed schema to automate the process. All music resources descriptions are derived from the NBD. The service will be launched in January 2005.

PictureAustralia - Debbie Campbell briefly reported that Elise Edmonds, the current PictureAustralia manager, will soon move to another job and the position will be advertised.

WebLaw - Barbara Thorsen reported that no further functional development of WebLaw is being envisaged at this stage. There are 31 subject areas at present and new partners are still being added, including court libraries and law firms. Usage has doubled since last year and this can be partially attributed to the partner institutions frequently referring their clients to WebLaw.

ASGF website usage May - October 2004

Barbara Rozmus tabled a report on the ASGF website usage during the last six months. The page views statistics and top pages requested were discussed, as well as the fact that no new websites linked to the ASGF website during this period. Further discussion revolved around more active promotion of the website, including such measures as making the website easier to find, and providing regular updates on the ASGF's activities to appropriate media channels. Sue Clarke suggested that the members could jointly share the costs of promoting the ASGF.

  • ACTION 1:
    Review the metadata behind the ASGF homepage and ensure the individual gateways' names are included (Barbara R.).
  • ACTION 2:
    Consider providing more access points to the ASGF homepage within the NLA website (Barbara R.).
  • ACTION 3:
    Consider additional ways of promoting the ASGF and its activities, including a production of a leaflet with a financial contribution from all ASGF members (All, Barbara R. to coordinate).

Presentations

National Library of Australia's People Portal Project by Judith Pearce, Director Business Analysis Unit, National Library of Australia

Judith provided an outline of the NLA People Portal (People Australia) project, stressing that the project is still in a conceptual stage with a feasibility study to be completed in December 2004. The project, taking a contextual approach to resource discovery, concentrates on people as primary targets by exploiting the investment in biographical and historical notes in authority files in a similar way as MusicAustralia does. Browsing would be a primary access method to the directory-like entries with links to alternative views and to associated resources. Finding people or organisations that share common characteristics (eg gender, role or field of activity) would also be possible. Entries would be freely available on the web.

Judith listed as enablers of the project such developments as the replacement of the Kinetica search service with the new Libraries Australia service (scheduled for December 2004), the planned implementation of a new Kinetica Update Database in December 2005, international projects such as LEAF (Linked European Authority File) and VIAF (Virtual International Authority File), and Web services and standards such as SRW/SRU.

Business arising

ASGF's input into the Australian standards activities

Debbie Campbell noted that Cath Parker's position as executive officer of the ASIC Secretariat has not been refunded. The ASGF is represented on the committee by Debbie and Jon Mason. Debbie reported on the ASIC meeting in August and talked about some of its future activities.

  • ACTION 4:
    Provide details of the seminar to be held in February 2005 on a repository architecture model for sharing of learning content (Debbie).

Following Debbie's invitation, Judith talked briefly about her involvement with the work of the ISO/TC46/SC4 (Subcommittee 4) on interoperability of information systems. They are currently working on developing an XML Holdings Schema for transfer of information on objects, both physical and digital, with a description behind them. Judith is also working on revising ISO 2146 (Information and documentation -- Directories of libraries and related organisations). Judith has also been involved with the MAMS project - she is working on the 'get' functions which will have to be supported by stable standards to enable passing requests on to other institutions.

Review of the entries in Technical Considerations of the ASGF

Barbara Rozmus reported on a low number of updates received for the gateways' entries on the Technical Considerations of the ASGF: Technologies, Specifications & Standards webpage. As this page attracts a relatively high number of visits it is desirable that the information is kept up to date.

ASGF goals and terms of reference

Jan Whitaker initiated a discussion on the ASGF role and its value for members. The following benefits of the ASGF membership were identified:

  • regular information exchange and sharing of experiences with other subject gateways practitioners
  • facilitation of partnerships/data exchange among the ASGF member gateways
  • access to the additional referral point to the individual gateways through the ASGF Gateways webpage
  • possibility of applying jointly for grants
  • opportunity for a regular briefing on the NLA activities relevant to subject gateways
  • access to expert advice by the NLA

Further discussion focussed on a number of issues considered crucial to the group's future such as:

  • the need to review the ASGF's role and scope:
    • some members perceive the current focus for the group as too narrow and advocate broadening the scope to online service delivery in general; this process should involve revisiting the definition of the term 'subject gateway' as in effect it defines the membership of the group
    • the relationship of the ASGF gateways to the ARIIC projects currently under development, as well as the general issue of where subject gateways fit into the information infrastructure in Australia, need to be clarified
  • governance issues:
    • an agreed formal charter could be useful in assisting with the current issues and with enquiries from prospective members; it could include membership criteria, decision-making mechanisms, meetings rules and procedures
    • Jan suggested that the group could develop a set of simplified rules (similar to the Australian Privacy Foundation's rules of incorporation) to serve as an ASGF charter
  • ASGF stakeholders:
    • we need to identify ASGF stakeholders; this would enable a more strategic approach to developing/maintaining appropriate relationships with them
    • to lift the profile of ASGF and of the individual gateways the relationships with particular stakeholder groups need to be better exploited
  • usefulness of the ASGF's activities in their present form:
    • Jan suggested that the members be asked to rate the current ASGF activities from 1-5 to enable focusing effort on the ones of most value to them
    • 6-monthly meetings - some members perceive the need to expand the format of the meetings beyond the information sharing activities. The ideas under consideration included: moving from two meetings a year to just one; having a different topic for each meeting; organising a workshop to expose the ASGF to other groups; holding an annual conference (of a format similar to John Shipp's Systemic Information Infrastructure Forum), which could involve a number of targeted presentations
    • the ASGF discussion list, hosted by education.au; the list is used mostly as an information sharing vehicle and is not very active at present
    • the ASGF website, hosted by the NLA (and being a part of the NLA website); its usage is reasonably high and has been growing steadily in the last 18 months; the website also comprises a password protected members area which includes the meeting materials, legal documents for members use only, and the ASGF submissions.
  • ACTION 6:
    All members to rate the usefulness of the current ASGF activities (All, Barbara R. to coordinate).
  • ACTION 7:
    Set up a Wiki in the members area of the ASGF website to enable better online communication and collaboration within the group. (Barbara R.).

Other business

Progress report on the ARROW project

Debbie Campbell reported that version 2 of Fedora, chosen by ARROW as the repository software, will be available on 15 December 2004. The next release of VITAL (built on Fedora architecture) will be out in February 2005. VITAL will provide storing, indexing, cataloguing, searching, retrieving capabilities and will be able to handle large text and image rich content collections. ARROW will be harvesting records daily from institutional repositories based on both FEDORA and DSpace.

A demo for the ARROW resource discovery service, developed by the NLA, is available on the test website http://arrow-test.nla.gov.au/. This part of the project will be completed by April 2005. Debbie explained the features of the service and invited feedback on it. ADT will be a contributor to ARROW. Content to be added to ARROW in 2005 includes research output by independent scholars and staff papers.

Regulatory environment for subject gateways

Jan Whitaker noted that that the Australia - US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) was signed last week. It is not known at this stage if any late changes were made to it. Jenny Millea commented that as a consequence of the AUSFTA, EdNA Online's current service contract may have to be redefined as a grant contract, and subsequently EdNA Online might go under tender.

Marie-Louise Ayres noted that countries such as Sweden and New Zealand now have legal deposit legislation for electronic resources implying that their national libraries have the right to collect electronic resources without the responsibility to do so.

Possibility of a joint ASGF application for a grant funding

Jenny Millea drew everyone's attention to the new funding for collaborative projects made available under the new Collaboration and Structural Reform Fund (CASR) which has replaced the Higher Education Innovation Programme. Jenny suggested that the ASGF could build on the synergies within the group to develop a CASR grant proposal.

Next meeting

Next meeting will be held in Canberra in six or twelve months time (the exact date to be advised).

Date last verified: 23 June 2005

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