Australian Subject Gateways Forum
Summary of Outcomes of the 23 May 2002 meeting
Held in Sydney at the University of New South Wales
The meeting was hosted by the University of New South Wales and chaired by Andrew Wells, University Librarian. Margot Bell, Director of the Information, Innovation and Infrastructure Policy Unit at the Innovation Branch, Higher Education Group, DEST, was invited to the meeting as a special guest.
Gateways represented
Australian Digital Theses Program, Agrigate, AusStage, AMOL, AustLit, AVEL, EdNA Online, LawAccess Online, MetaChem, MusicAustralia, PictureAustralia, Weblaw
Business arising
Outcomes and action items from the 31 August 2001 meeting were discussed and the following comments were made:
An interoperability workshop (Action 1)
Jen stated that Education.Au is about to start a series of workshops on metadata harvesting, based on the new EdNA tool just developed. The proposed workshop could be based on this model.
- ACTION 1:
Barbara to follow up organising a workshop with Education.Au
Legal agreements (Action 3)
None of the gateways agreements have been signed by all their partners yet.
- ACTION 2:
All gateways to provide a copy of their legal agreement for access in the Members only area of the ASGF website when the agreements are signed.
MOU between AMOL and EdNA Online (Action 4)
The MOU has not been finalised as yet.
- ACTION 3:
Basil to provide a copy of the AMOL/EdNA Online MOU for access in the Members only area of the ASGF website when finalised.
Project/s for a joint ASGF application for funding (Action 17)
Margot Bell commented on the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative grants. A committee (chaired by John Shipp) was recently set up to advise the Minister on the information infrastructure required to effectively support research in the HE sector, and to identify priorities for funding under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative programme. It would be possible for the group to make a joint submission to the committee regarding development of a Resource Discovery Network (RDN) type model for the Australian subject gateways.
Andrew offered to be a liaison person between the group and John Shipp. Further discussion on this item was deferred to Other Business.
- ACTION 4:
Barbara to make available in the Members only area of the ASGF website John Shipp's paper submitted to DEST (Margot to supply).
Progress reports
The participants provided additional comments on their gateways developments in the last 8 months, complementing the progress reports submitted before the meeting.
Agrigate will look into more direct usability testing as they found that the response rate to their online survey was poor.
AusStage went live recently but a few problems were still experienced. The URL is http://www.ausstage.edu.au.
AustLit will present a paper and a poster session at the AusWeb 2002 conference.
AVEL will look for new sources of funding to redevelop the sustainable development resources gateway.
EdNA Online - Pru Mitchell was recently appointed to the position of Higher Education Officer. MyFuture Gateway (myfuture.edu.au), funded by DEST, will be launched in June. It will provide career information to a wide range of users.
LawAccess Online will be launched on 17 June. The gateway will be tied in with a phone advice service.
MusicAustralia - the pilot service is unlikely to be publicly available for some time. The results of the work done on the metadata may be applicable to the development of the learning objects delivery systems.
PictureAustralia will soon be moved to a new platform as the currently used Blue Angel Technology software proved to be problematic in terms of scalability.
Australian Digital Theses Program - some NZ universities are interested in joining the ADT. CAUL has provided UNSW with funding to continue managing the service.
WebLaw - working on the advanced search function. The total number of records reached 936.
AMOL - experimenting with data sharing with EdNA Online and the National Library. The Royal Blind Society was involved in accessibility testing with visually impaired. AMOL has recently won two Best of the Web Awards at the international Museums and the Web Conference.
MetaChem - Andrew will look into finalising the status of MetaChem.
- ACTION 5:
Basil to make available to the group the AMOL paper on accessibility presented at the OzeCulture conference. - ACTION 6:
A small working group, including Nicole and Barbara, to be formed to work on a membership model for the ASGF.
New business
UK HE portals development (Judith Clark, Head, Academic Support Services, University of Ballarat)
Judith's talk, titled Subject portals: a new information delivery model, outlined the current portal developments in the UK. As there was a lot of interest from the participants Judith agreed that her presentation would be included in the Members only area of the ASGF website.
Proof-of-concept for a new resource discovery service at NLA - project overview (Debbie Campbell) followed by a demo of the AMOL OAI service (Basil Dewhurst)
Roxanne presented the overview on Debbie's behalf. The presentation was received with interest and the participants asked to be kept up to date with the project's progress.
Basil presented a demo of the AMOL OAI service. The group agreed that OAI should be considered as a topic for the interoperability workshop.
Project management and partnerships issues in collaborative subject gateway projects (Marie-Louise Ayres, Kerry Kilner)
Marie-Louise and Kerry talked about their experiences in managing AustLit. The particular areas of interest to the participants included the long-term sustainability, issues associated with shifting from a project to a program status, and staff management in a distributed collaborative environment.
Demonstration of AusStage
Jenny gave a short presentation of AusStage. There are a number of areas still under development.
Other business
Problems with dynamic URLs generated by government portals (Jan Whitaker)
The issue was briefly discussed by the participants. Roxanne offered to bring it to the attention of the NLA staff involved in organising the joint NLA/NOIE/NAA seminar Keeping Online Government Publications Available planned for July 2002.
- ACTION 7:
Barbara to include an item on the NLA/NOIE/NAA seminar results in the agenda of the next meeting. - ACTION 8:
Barbara to alert the organisers of the NLA/NOIE/NAA seminar to the problems with dynamic URLs generated by government portals. - ACTION 9:
Roxanne to send to the ASGF members information on the Commonwealth government agencies survey regarding their print and online publications records on the NBD.
Joint ASGF application for funding (continued from Business Arising)
Margot Bell stated that another possibility would be to apply for funds under the HE Innovation Programme (which has no calendar cycle attached to it). Submissions under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative must demonstrate that a proposed project would improve the underpinning research capacity of the university/universities involved.
- ACTION 10:
The NLA to coordinate work on a concept paper on a proposal for development of an Australian RDN equivalent.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be held in Adelaide in late October or early November 2002, hosted by Joh Hartog at Flinders University.
The agenda is to include:
- a presentation on the AARLIN project
- a progress report on the NLA resource discovery service
- outcomes of the NLA/NOIE/NAA seminar on government online publications
- a membership model for the ASGF
Date last verified: 19 January 2005
