Australian Subject Gateways Forum
Minutes of the 23 May 2003 Meeting
Held in Brisbane at the University of Queensland
The meeting was hosted by the Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library at the University of Queensland.
Attendees
Tony Arthur (Agrigate, ATUA), Marie-Louise Ayres (MusicAustralia, Australia Dancing), Nicole Clark (chair, AVEL), Carol Hetherington (AustLit), Kerry Kilner (AustLit), Jenny Millea (EdNA Online), Barbara Rozmus (minutes), Barbara Thorsen (WebLaw), Chris Taylor (AVEL), Jan Whitaker (Agrigate)
Guest speaker: Jillian Dellit (Le@rning Federation)
Apologies
Toby Burrows, Debbie Campbell, Sten Christensen, Joh Hartog, Jon Mason, Jenny White
Gateways represented
Agrigate, ATUA, AustLit, Australia Dancing, AVEL, EdNA Online, MusicAustralia, Weblaw
Welcome
Janine Schmidt, University Librarian, welcomed the participants and wished everyone a productive day. She asked Nicole Clark to chair the meeting.
New business
Presentation by Jillian Dellit, Le@rning Federation,
Jillian's presentation, titled Towards an Australian Public Knowledge Gateway in Education, was well received and generated a lively discussion. Jillian spoke about her work in the MCEETYA ICT in Schools Taskforce http://icttaskforce.edna.edu.au/), chaired by Dr Martyn Forrest, Secretary, Department of Education in Tasmania. The Taskforce is responsible for providing strategic advice to all Australian Education Ministers on issues related to the use of information communication technologies.
The Taskforce works towards building a publicly accessible knowledge network for education for teachers, parents, students and researchers. Some models for such a network the Taskforce is exploring include the Cochrane Collaboration http://www.cochrane.org/, NZ ICT Project, and AustLII http://www.austlii.edu.au/.
- ACTION 1:
To invite an AustLII representative to the next ASGF meeting to give a presentation on the AustLII model and issues such as sustainability, partnerships strategy etc. Jan Whitaker is to make the first contact with AustLII. Barbara Rozmus is to finalise the invitation.
Progress reports
The participants provided additional comments on their gateways developments in the last 6 months, complementing the progress reports submitted before the meeting.
Agrigate Tony Arthur is heading a group of University of Melbourne staff coordinating the University's involvement in various subject gateways. The group has regular working meetings.
AustLit The retrospective indexing project has continued. Another focus for this year has been multicultural literature. Public library sector is currently targeted as potential subscribers. AustLit's contract with Ebsco as their distribution agent is under review. The International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control journal has published Kerry Kilner and Marie-Louise Ayres' paper:
Ayres, Marie-Louise et. al. 2003, "Report on the Successful AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway Implementation of the FRBR and INDECS Event Models, and Implications for Other FRBR Implementations", International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control, Vol. 32 No. 1, January/March 2003, pp. 8-13.
AVEL Weeding of IT records which do not fit into the sustainable development focus of AVEL has continued. A Green Design Builder, being built by UQ students under the direction of Professor Radliffe, may become an add on to the AVEL gateway.
EdNA Online The new HE officer, Nelly Ivanova, is in the process of establishing partnerships in the HE community. EdNA metadata standard is now under review. The international partnerships established with MERLOT, GEM and European Schoolnet are very valuable but their management takes a considerable amount of time. Use of a number of thesauri in EdNA Online contributes to the problems with content quality. Work is being done on integrating and automating of various processes behind the scenes.
Australia Dancing Marie-Louise Ayres provided a short report on behalf of Michelle Potter, Australia Dancing manager, also based at the NLA. The Australia Dancing gateway is very important to the dance community. It moved from a HTML based directory to a database structure last year. At present the gateway has seven partners but content is still derived solely at the NLA. An ARC LIEF grant application (lead by the Edith Cowen University) has just been submitted, asking for funding to enable distributed update capacity. It is planned to produce a number of short promotional videos on Australia Dancing.
MusicAustralia Following its change of strategy for resource discovery MusicAustralia will use general harvester model to harvest records to Kinetica (the NBD) first and from there to MusicAustralia. It is hoped that some 190,000 records in a variety of formats will be harvested that way. Marie-Louise is involved in the work on developing guidelines for writing contributor-specific conversion routines from the XML format used for bibliographic information to the MODS standard for contributions to the NBD. The NLA is going to propose a number of additions to the MODS standard (which is supported by the Library of Congress). In addition, partnership development work has been taking a lot of time, as it has involved dealing with complex content digitisation issues.
WebLaw 27 subject areas are currently being managed by 20 WebLaw partners, with 190,000 records evaluated and processed. The gateway is considered to be highly sustainable as the partners' contribution is within the scope of their core activities. However further significant growth is only possible with introduction of new subject areas. Link checking is undertaken every night using an excellent in-house developed software product.
- ACTION 2:
Barbara Rozmus to provide information on the MODS standard and the COLIS project on the ASGF website.
Business arising
Outcomes and action items from the 8 November 2002 meeting were discussed and the following comments were made.
Funding, collaboration and sustainability options for existing and continuing gateways, including a progress report on the DEST SII initiative (Action 2)
The group expressed its disappointment in the delay in progressing this issue. Jenny Millea and Kerry Kilner will attend the Digital Objects Repository Management Forum next week in Sydney and hope to be able to put forward the ASGF's perspective. The new ARC Research Networks program was mentioned as a new possible funding source for subject gateways as it aims to encourage collaborative approaches to research in inter-disciplinary settings.
- ACTION 3:
Jenny Millea and Kerry Kilner to brief the ASGF members about the outcomes of the HE Digital Repositories Forum.
Revision of the ASGF gateways standards information on the ASGF website (Action 8)
Barbara Rozmus asked the meeting for feedback on the draft document with standards information which has been placed in the Members Only area of the ASGF website.
- ACTION 4:
All gateways to send to Barbara additions/revisions to the standards information document by 23 June 2003, so it can be finalised and placed in the open area of the ASGF website.
- ACTION 5:
All members to be active in exposing the standards information document more broadly to groups which are likely to be interested, eg the DC-ANZ community.
Data verification practices (Actions 4 & 5)
It was decided that Action items 4 and 5 will be postponed to the next meeting
Update on the ASGF submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Role of Libraries in the Online Environment
Barbara Thorsen reported on the Senate Inquiry into the Role of Libraries in the Online Environment hearing on 28 November in Sydney where Barbara and Janine Schmidt represented the ASGF. The transcript of the hearing is available at http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s5984.pdf, pp. 21-30.
Marie-Louise Ayres reported briefly that the Senate Inquiry members visited the NLA in March and were given a presentation on the new NLA initiatives. It was very well received.
Barbara Rozmus stated that the deadline for the final Senate Inquiry report has been extended till the end of June 2003.
Other business
Subject gateways and the issue of longevity
Marie-Louise Ayres briefed the meeting on the recent review of PANDORA's collecting priorities (see http://pandora.nla.gov.au/BSC49.doc for more details). They include (in this order):
- Government publications.
- Research reports, conference proceedings and other major pieces of scholarship.
- Snapshot view of everyday type issues websites (only significant websites will classify).
Subject gateways can choose to become an indexing partner of PANDORA (as AustLit has done). Alternatively, all gateways can use PANDORA's service for indexing and abstracting agencies. PANDORA will, on request, archive indexed and abstracted Australian Internet publications and allocate a persistent identifier to them for citation purposes.
- ACTION 6:
All ASGF subject gateways to ensure that their indexers are aware of the PANDORA's service for indexing and abstracting agencies and use it when appropriate.
Discussion paper on sharing of records between the NBD and subject gateways
The paper, jointly prepared by Roxanne Missingham and Chris Taylor, was discussed with interest. Chris Taylor commented on the proposal in his capacity as a member of the Kinetica Advisory Committee. The aim of the pilot project is to find out how a two-way sharing of records between the NBD and subject gateways can be achieved in an efficient manner. AVEL and EdNA Online expressed interest in participating in the pilot. They will contact Roxanne directly about the pilot arrangements.
Meta Matters moving to DC-ANZ
Barbara Rozmus informed the meeting that the NLA has recently agreed that the Meta Matters website would soon move to DC-ANZ. The DC-ANZ organisation is interested in providing metadata resources useful in the Australian/New Zealand context and Meta Matters will become a core of this new service.
- ACTION 7:
Barbara to pass a vote of thanks to Debbie Campbell for her role in setting up the Meta Matters website, which was considered to be a very important and timely resource on metadata at the time.
Demonstration of the new EdNA Online Personalisation, Community and Search Centre functions
Jenny Millea gave a demonstration of the new generation EdNA Online (http://new.edna.edu.au/) and explained the objectives of this redevelopment. The new functions include shared workspace, personalisation and enhanced features of the search facility. The software used is an open source package called Jahia, an integrated web content management and portal server. Jenny encouraged everyone to provide feedback on the new EdNA Online - either through the survey available from the front screen or via email to askedna@edna.edu.au.
Next meeting
Next meeting will be held in Melbourne in November 2003 (the exact date to be advised), hosted by the University of Melbourne.
Date last verified: 19 January 2005
