Research data and repository metadata. Policy and technical issues at the University of Sydney Library.

The University of Sydney Library’s repository contains research outputs primarily comprising traditional publication types. Many academics manage data collections within databases and spreadsheets using metadata dissimilar to the repository’s Dublin Core schema. During 2007 and 2008 the author explored issues surrounding submission of a small range of research data collections and associated metadata. Native metadata structures were analysed and mapped to DC and scripts translated, packaged and transferred collections. This paper discusses metadata management and repository service levels and sustainability. It describes the Library’s approach to defining service requirements and includes discussion of various metadata management options. It also describes related activities within the University of Sydney to develop eResearch services and to harmonise the roles and relationships of eResearch support service provider

Sustainability Guidelines for Australian Repositories Project (SUGAR)

The Sustainability Guidelines for Australian Repositories service (SUGAR) was intended to support people working in tertiary education institutions whose activities do not focus on digital preservation. The target community creates and digitises content for a range of purposes to support learning, teaching and research. While some have access to technical and administrative support many others may not be aware of what they need to know. The typical SUGAR user may have little interest in discussions surrounding metadata, interoperability or digital preservation, and may simply want to know the essential steps involved in achieving the task at hand

Sowing seeds in the digital garden

PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Researching teacher educators’ preparedness to teach to and about diversity : Investigating epistemic reflexivity as a new conceptual framework

There is growing international concern about the extent to which teachers are prepared to work with an increasingly diverse student (and community) population. To date, research into the relationship between teacher preparation and preparedness to teach diverse learners has not focused on teacher educators’ understandings about teaching to/about diversity. Such understandings can be informed by epistemic aspects of professional work. Epistemic cognitions (cognitions about knowledge and knowing) allow professionals to generate perspectives necessary to tackle new and old challenges. The social lab reported in this paper investigated 12 Australian teacher educators’ perspectives about teaching to/about diversity using the 3R-Epistemic Cognition (EC) framework. The findings showed that the 3R-EC framework could be useful for capturing epistemic reflexive dialogues about teaching to/about diversity, although some aspects of the framework were identified by the teacher educators as challenging. On the basis of these identified challenges, refinements concerning communication and use of the 3R-EC framework were identified. The feedback also led to some refinements of the social lab methodology for use in the larger national study

eBot: a collaborative learning object repository for Australian flora

The University of Sydney eBot project was designed as a collaborative, sustainable repository for digital botanical objects. From its inception the repository was viewed as an effective way to bring together the collections of images and resources that we use in research and to support learning and teaching of undergraduate Plant Sciences at The University of Sydney. Objects contained within the repository range from the microscopic to entire landscapes. They include digitised herbarium specimens and associated temporal and spatial data. The metadata supporting the system enable effective archiving and retrieval of objects and is informed by international developments in botanical digital standards. The strength of this repository is that part of the metadata maps to the currently accepted taxonomy for the green plants. The eBot schema was derived from a range of descriptive standards, including the Herbarium Information Standards and Protocols for Interchange of Data (HISPID). This will ensure compatibility with digital herbaria in Australia. In addition to describing the scientific content of objects, the project addresses access and sustainability issues by including rights management data and information about the technical attributes of each object. To ensure the integrity of database content, all objects are validated by an expert reviewer prior to the images going ‘live’. eBot will be accessible later in 2008. Our view is that the project has potential to be used beyond the Plant Sciences and outside the university environment

DARIAH Beyond Europe

International audienceDARIAH, the digital humanities infrastructure with origins and an organisational home in Europe, is nearing the completion of its implementation phase. The significant investment from the European Commission and member countries has yielded a robust set of technical and social infrastructures, ranging from working groups, various registries, pedagogical materials, and software to support diverse approaches to digital humanities scholarship. While the funding and leadership of DARIAH to date has come from countries in, or contiguous with, Europe, the needs that drive its technical and social development are widely shared within the international digital humanities community beyond Europe. Scholars on every continent would benefit from well-supported technical tools and platforms, directories for facilitating access to information and resources, and support for working groups.The DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop series, organised and financed under the umbrella of the DESIR project (“DARIAH ERIC Sustainability Refined,” 2017–2019, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program), convened three meetings between September 2018 and March 2019 in the United States and Australia. These workshops served as fora for cross-cultural exchange, and introduced many non-European DH scholars to DARIAH; each of the workshops included a significant delegation from various DARIAH bodies, together with a larger number of local presenters and participants. The local contexts for these workshops were significantly different in their embodiment of research infrastructures: on the one hand, in the U.S., a private research university (Stanford) and the de facto national library (the Library of Congress), both in a country with a history of unsuccessful national-scale infrastructure efforts; and in Australia, a system which has invested substantially more in coordinated national research infrastructure in science and technology, but very little on a national scale in the humanities and arts. Europe is in many respects ahead of both host countries in terms of its research infrastructure ecosystem both at the national and pan-European levels.The Stanford workshop had four main topics of focus: corpus management; text and image analysis; geohumanities; and music, theatre, and sound studies. As the first of the workshops, the Stanford group also took the lead in proposing next steps toward exploring actionable “DARIAH beyond Europe” initiatives, including the beginnings of a blog shared among participants from all the workshops, extra-European use of DARIAH’s DH Course Registry, and non-European participation in DARIAH Working Groups.The overall theme of the Library of Congress workshop was “Collections as Data,” building on a number of U.S.-based initiatives exploring how to enhance researcher engagement with digital collections through computationally-driven research. In Washington, D.C., the knowledge exchange sessions focussed on digitised newspapers and text analysis, infrastructural challenges for public humanities, and the use of web-archives in DH research. As at Stanford, interconnecting with DARIAH Working Groups was of core interest to participants, and a new Working Group was proposed to explore global access and use of digitised historical newspapers. A further important outcome was the agreement to explore collaboration between the U.S.-based “Collections as Data” initiatives and the Heritage Data Reuse Charter in Europe. The third and final workshop in the series took place in March 2019 in Australia, hosted by the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Convened by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), together with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and DARIAH, this event was co-located with the Academy’s second annual Humanities, Arts and Culture Data Summit. The first day of the event, targeted at research leadership and policy makers, was intended to explore new horizons for data-driven humanities and arts research, digital cultural collections and research infrastructure. The two subsequent days focused on engaging with a wide variety of communities, including (digital) humanities researchers and cultural heritage professionals. Organised around a series of Knowledge Exchange Sessions, combined with research-led lightning talks, the participants spoke in detail about how big ideas can be implemented practically on the ground. This poster reflects on the key outcomes and future directions arising from these three workshops, and considers what it might look like for DARIAH to be adopted as a fundamental DH infrastructure in a complex variety of international, national, and regional contexts, with diverse funding models, resources, needs, and expectations. One major outcome of all workshops was the shared recognition that, in spite of extensive funding, planning, and goodwill, these workshops were not nearly global enough in their reach: most importantly they were not inclusive of the Global South. Our new DARIAH beyond Europe community has a strong shared commitment to address this gap

The mineralogy and petrology of I-type cosmic spherules: Implications for their sources, origins and identification in sedimentary rocks

I-type cosmic spherules are micrometeorites that formed by melting during atmospheric entry and consist mainly of iron oxides and FeNi metal. I-types are important because they can readily be recovered from sedimentary rocks allowing study of solar system events over geological time. We report the results of a study of the mineralogy and petrology of 88 I-type cosmic spherules recovered from Antarctica in order to evaluate how they formed and evolved during atmospheric entry, to constrain the nature of their precursors and to establish rigorous criteria by which they may be conclusively identified within sediments and sedimentary rocks. Two textural types of I-type cosmic spherule are recognised: (1) metal bead-bearing (MET) spherules dominated by Ni-poor (100 and suggest that metal from H-group ordinary, CM, CR and iron meteorites may form the majority of particles. Oxidation during entry heating increases in the series MET 80 wt% Ni comprising a particle mass fraction of <0.2. Non-equilibrium effects in the exchange of Ni between wüstite and metal, and magnetite and wüstite are suggested as proxies for the rate of oxidation and cooling rate respectively. Variations in magnetite and wüstite crystal sizes are also suggested to relate to cooling rate allowing relative entry angle of particles to be evaluated. The formation of secondary metal in the form of sub-micron Ni-rich or Pt-group nuggets and as symplectite with magnetite was also identified and suggested to occur largely due to the exsolution of metallic alloys during decomposition of non-stoichiometric wüstite. Weathering is restricted to replacement of metal by iron hydroxides. The following criteria are recommended for the conclusive identification of I-type spherules within sediments and sedimentary rocks: (i) spherical particle morphologies, (ii) dendritic crystal morphologies, (iii) the presence of wüstite and magnetite, (iv) Ni-bearing wüstite and magnetite, and (v) the presence of relict FeNi metal

Publishing Controlled Vocabularies for Access and Reuse

This work covers the questions of how may vocabularies be published online for access by people and software? What is SKOS and how does it support vocabulary reuse? What are some examples of tools that help people work on vocabularies without requiring them to possess highly detailed technical knowledge? Discussion of areas include: An introduction to SKOS, why it was developed, and how it may be used to express the features of a controlled vocabulary. Tools for creating, managing, publishing and accessing vocabularies, including those provided by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), through the Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) service. Vocabulary registry interoperability. What if there were a network of vocabulary registries providing shared access to resources? An overview of the Australian Vocabulary Special Interest Group (AVSIG), which has as one of its areas of focus support and guidance for those starting out with vocabularies

Archaeological Fish Bones Online: a digital archive of Sydney fishes

The article presents the Archaeological Fish Bone Images sustainable digital archive and XTF-based image search and presentation tools developed with University of Sydney Library. The archive contains over 500 images of modern and archaeological fish remains and was developed as part of an archaeological research project into colonial and traditional Aboriginal fishing practices in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia from c.3000 years ago to the late 19th century. Links are provided to research information about fish ecology and fishing, the cultural and historical significance of fish taxa and details of taxonomic and anatomical nomenclature. Archaeological fish-bone images at the University of Sydney The article explains how and why the archive was developed, and identifies and discusses the research implications of significant gaps in current fish reference collections. Archive content is useful to researchers who need to identify and interpret fish remains of the same or similar biological taxa from Sydney or elsewhere. The design of the archive and online tools is relevant to other applications that use digital images to aid identification and interpretation of archaeological and other collections