Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/6614
The aims of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Project were to establish a centre of excellence for the management of scholarly assets in digital format.
Online collections of scholarly materials are bringing about a quiet revolution in the way researchers work. Researchers have faster easier ways of finding and analyzing research materials. New modes of research and new research methodologies are all now possible. APSR was a partnership that aimed to promote excellence in building & managing these collections of digital research objects.
The Partnership received Federal Government funding to assist Australian researchers with research information management. To this end, APSR conducted outreach and educational programs and undertakes collaborative development of systems and tools.
The Partnership was an eclectic one including major research universities, the National Library of Australia, and APAC (Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing). This reflected the broad nature of the issues faced and the capabilities required in managing Australia’s research data and scholarly information in digital format.
APSR worked closely with research communities, information professionals, technical staff, and higher education policy makers on a series of development projects, surveys, publications, seminars, and training workshops. The Partnership aimed to help create the systems required for managing data and information in a research environment and simultaneously to increase the capability of Australian researchers to do so.
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ANU Archive Item Open Access The AAF and ShibbolethDalziel, James; Witheridge, Neil; Lin, AizhongThe Australian Access Project is a DEST-funded project to implement a trust federation for Australian higher education and research. Macquarie University is leading the Shibboleth component of this project, building on the existing testbed federation and development work conducted in the Meta Access Management System (MAMS) project (also funded by DEST). The Shibboleth software was developed by Internet 2, and provides a mechanism for “Identity Providers” to securely share identity attributes with “Service Providers” to allow for access to protected resources, collaborative workspaces and other shared services. The MAMS project also developed a Shibboleth-based “Virtual Organisation” system (“IAMSuite”) to allow for the creation and management of distributed research teams, including access to protected resources and services. This presentation provides an overview of work conducted within the MAMS project, an update on the progress of the Shibboleth component of the AAF, and the use of virtual organisations (based on IAMSuite) within this trust federation.ANU Archive Item Open Access Accelerating investigative discoveryFlanagan, MartinSince the beginning of the computing era, a key problem has been how to let 'ordinary' people ask arbitrarily deep and meaningful questions of large collections of data without being forced to resort to programming experts. The historical 'solution' was to have teams of programmers writing 'applications' for 'users' - an expensive approach whose deliverable becomes rapidly out of date leading to the well known silo problem. The Semantic Web is purposed to replace the increasingly cumbersome nature of this model - using Ontologies to describe concepts and their relationships, questions can be now phrased in terms that represent the questioners' domain of expertise in familiar language, with software then translating that into the computer code needed to retrieve the answers. The Semantic Discovery System (SDS) is InSilico Discovery's software product that implements this 'simple questions/relevant answers' Semantic Web vision, and is especially acclaimed for its unique ability to efficiently retrieve the answers from multiple distributed and disparate sources of the organisation's internal production data - as well of course as external Web sources. Gartner call this the Corporate Semantic Web - Organisations understandably want to leverage the huge value existing in production systems, but without being forced to do a mass data migration to a new architecture - they want a "Semantic Web Bridge". This bridge is the value SDS supplies - the organisational data remains in situ but it can now fulfil two purposes simultaneously - continuing to serve day to day production needs but also now supporting ad hoc research queries. SDS achieves this capability by using Semantic Web technologies (OWL, SPARQL, RDF etc) to represent a logical view of the world coupled with a Federated Query system to retrieve the physical data that will always reside in situ inside databases, files, proprietary systems etc. SDS has been built over a 10 year period (in collaboration with Universities of Pennsylvania, Manchester and GSK) based on referenceable implementations at major Pharmaceutical companies. This paper discusses capabilities of the SDS product family and plans for the immediate future.ANU Archive Item Open Access Access Grid, video conferencing, and real life simulationThorns, David; Allan, MaryA 2006 pilot study investigating patterns of interaction in Access Grid environment revealed situations in which real- life strategies and practices were mirrored in the AG environment. Following this observation, further study is underway to investigate AG environments as simulators of Face-to-face interactions. This paper describes the findings of the ongoing study. It investigates patterns of interactions among people, and the ways in which they interact with the technological environment, and use various artifacts for conveying and sharing information when collaborating over AG and other video conferencing systems. Building on the hypothesis that AG and other advanced video conferencing tools create a simulated face- to-face environment, the study investigates the emergence of spontaneous, informal collaboration alongside planned collaborative activities. The paper raises the question whether the forms of communication allow the creation of new forms of knowledge and require the development of new research practices.ANU Archive Item Open Access All aboard, destination: SeamlessLansdown, Anne-MarieA key enabler for e-Research in Australia is to give researchers seamless access to resources, including each other. Significant investments have been made, and are continuing to be made, in supplying the above resources. Convergence, a key driver of current developments in telecommunications, media and information technology industries, has brought about the rapid evolution of digital, information and communications technologies and has created an environment in which the paradigms of research have changed. Convergence is not just about the technology evolution. It is about services and about new ways of doing business and of interacting with society. It has created growing demand by researchers for services including seamless access to data held in universities, publicly funded research agencies, government agencies and industry; access to data generated by scientific facilities and access to computational capability. The emergence of new services and the development of existing services are expected to provide researchers with more opportunities. They may want access from anywhere anytime to any service, independently of the technology used, or the geographical point of such access within a trusted environment. At the same time the evolution of the capability and sophistication of scientific instruments and facilities has seen an explosion in the quantum of data produced by experimentation, and the complexity of analyses conducted through data sharing. Globalisation amplifies the international dimension of convergence. The global reach of the Internet has already shown a need for international solutions to a number of key issues such as security, intellectual property rights, privacy and interoperability. The effective re-use of research data on a national basis is the primary goal of the government and institutional investments into national data infrastructure. The investments will deliver access services; and outreach services for researchers and institutions that can enhance the effective use of data within a federated research data management system. The outcome will be the ability for all researchers to identify, locate, access and analyse any available research data, regardless of origin or scale, to interface with the outside world, within trusted environments for example the Australian Access Federation. The key facilitators for this are adequate physical resources, middleware, access to data including data collection and generation; data storage and the physical management of stored data; the evolution of standards to enable data to be used and interpreted; and access regimes to permit data to be accessible. The Australian Government, in partnership with research communities, state governments and key research agencies, is working towards coordinating the advancement of Australia’s national e-Research capabilities. The timely development of these capabilities, in an increasingly competitive international environment, will entail the careful coordination and bringing together of distributed initiatives and projects already undertaken by research communities, many institutions and jurisdictions. e-Research capabilities will also underpin the implementation of the Australian Government’s Research Quality Framework (RQF). A key enabler of the RQF will be the Accessibility Framework, which will set out the principles governing the need for improved access to the outcomes and outputs of publicly-funded research. Ongoing work through the NCRIS Platforms for Collaboration capability will determine the strategic and balanced investments in system-wide infrastructure and ICT enabled services to support Australian researchers. Only by a concerted, strongly-directed, intervention-based strategy and national cooperation will the critical mass be achieved to more fully enable Australian researchers with e-Research capabilities. By combining our resources, we will enhance the chances and opportunities for our researchers in the years to come.ANU Archive Item Open Access ANU Archive Item Open Access The Alti-i Labs Interoperability DemonstratorTownsend, JohnANU Archive Item Open Access ANU DSpace Dissemination ServiceRaftos, Peter; Monus, LeoObjects stored in a digital repository may be accessed, rendered or displayed in any number of ways. Images may be searched for and then viewed online; or they may be printed or downloaded as high-resolution for layout in a print magazine. Film may be streamed; data tables may be queried in situ; humans may search the repository or machines may interrogate it. There are multiple repository applications and multiple 'levels'� of repository: long-term archives, CVS trees, streaming servers (to name just a few). Clearly, there is a need for a standardised object or template which any dissemination mechanism could expect to receive when requesting content from a repository. Philosophically, this concept is the flip side to the APSR RIFF Submission service.ANU Archive Item Open Access APAC: A National Research Infrastructure ProgramO'Callaghan, JohnANU Archive Item Open Access APSR - a National Partnership for Sustainability(2005-06-10) Burton, AdrianANU Archive Item Open Access APSR Image Workflow Final Report(Australia: Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)) Gutsche, TristanThe project was setup to develop a process for submission, sustainable storage, and reproduction, of image collections within the RIFF environment, which will provide the higher education community with greater resources and capabilities for the utilization of digital media. The project will address the issues of, mapping image collection metadata to the standard NLA METS profile, as well as and fundamental presentation functionality for user interaction with image collections. Initially image collections where to be referred to as “Image Albums”, however this was latter dropped by the NLA committee. To demonstrate the presentation of image collections, templates where developed in Manakin by ANU, and the iSpheres repository system developed a connector allowing access to Dspace objects and metadata via web services. By this means, objects from Dspace and other repositories, may be presented throguh custom web and desktop applications. The project was scheduled to be complete in 2007 and will be demonstrated at the Clever Collections conference in November.ANU Archive Item Open Access APSR Sustainability Issues Discussion Paper(Australia: Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)) Bradley, KevinThis paper was initially envisaged as a higher level document intended for the steering committee through the executive officer. However, the formation of the expert committee at the December steering committee meeting suggests that a task based document would be more appropriate for that forum, referred to them by the steering committee. The final outcome of the process for which this discussion paper was written is a task based plan that will support the APSR aim of elucidating the critical issues of the access continuity and the sustainability of digital collections. It may be utilised to fulfil the requirement of an issues and strategy paper as outlined in Milestone 1 in the APSR Project Specification 12 February 2004.ANU Archive Item Open Access The Architecture and Standards Environments in Which PREMIS Needs to OperateBlackall, ChrisThis presentation provides an overview of the information architectures and standards in which PREMIS will be implemented. The key standards related to PREMIS will be identified and discussed, as well as the crucial relationships between these standards and the underlying information architectures and systems adopted by institutions that are, taken together, the essential foundations for the long-term preservation and accessibility of digital information. To illustrate the relationship between standards and information architectures and systems, a range of examples will be discussed, drawn from APSR-supported projects that are using institutional repositories to preserve research information and data. Finally, based on these examples, there will be discussion in broad terms of the opportunities for improving digital preservation that lay ahead, but also some of the barriers.ANU Archive Item Open Access ASK-OSS, DRAMA and RAMS: eResearch support from MELCOEDalziel, James; Warouw, Ray; Nguyen, ChiMELCOE at Macquarie University is well known for its work on the MAMS and Australian Access Federation (AAF) projects; but it also provides eResearch support in a number of other areas. (1) ASK-OSS is the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software - it provides a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australian higher education and research sector. (2) DRAMA is implementing a flexible authentication and authorisation framework for repositories (using Fedora as a case study), including linkages with the AAF to form a trust fabric for data sharing. (3) RAMS is a new generation of workflow system for team-based research collaboration, including a visual drag-and-drop authoring environment for workflow creation. This presentation will provide an overview of each of these MELCOE activities.ANU Archive Item Open Access ASSDA: A Trusted Digital Repository or a trusted digital repositoryHolloway, SophieSince 1981, The Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) at the Australian National University has been trusted by its designated community to preserve and redistribute social science data according to the wishes of the data creators and the needs of the community. ASSDA exists within its designated community, staff are trained within that community and all developments are guided by community leaders. Trust in ASSDA is strong, with deposition often being automatic and stipulated as essential by granting bodies like ARC. However, when using the Audit Checklist for the Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories (TDR) ASSDA has many challenges ahead, perhaps the greatest of which involves the funding cycles intrinsic to the university sector. This paper seeks to provide a case study of a digital repository and its issues for compliance to a TDR audit.ANU Archive Item Open Access The Australasian Repository for Diffraction ImagesBuckle, AshleyANU Archive Item Open Access Australia's Remotely Sensed Data Archive - the Next 25 Years and BeyondBarr, StuartThe Australian Centre for Remote Sensing holds an unbroken archive of remotely sensed data covering all of Australia spanning in excess of 25 years. Sound practices initiated in the early years and maintained since then ensure that the entire ACRES archive remains accessible. Measurement of long-term temporal change of the Australian landscape was made possible through this archive; inevitably there will be other uses in the future for this unique archive that we cannot predict. This presentation discusses how a review of the audit checklist is being used to review practices to ensure that the archive remains accessible indefinitely.ANU Archive Item Open Access Australian Framework and Action Plan for Digital Heritage Collections: Response to the Collections Council of AustraliaBurton, Adrian; Henty, MargaretANU Archive Item Open Access The Australian METS Profile – A Journey about Metadata(D-Lib Magazine) Pearce, Judith; Pearson, David; Williams, Megan; Yeadon, ScottIn any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination.ANU Archive Item Open Access Australian participation in the world's largest eResearch infrastructure: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid and the EGEE programMoloney, GlennThe EGEE collaboration (Enabling Grids for EsciencE) and the international high energy physics community have been building the world's largest international eresearch infrastructure: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. EGEE operates a "production" infrastructure across Europe, Asia and the Americas. The EGEE grid runs up to 50,000 jobs per month from applications in diverse research disciplines including high energy physics, earth sciences, and the life sciences. An Australian node of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid has been deployed at the University of Melbourne to support the data and computing needs of Australian physicists participating in the international ATLAS experiment, based at the CERN laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland. We will present the status and plans for the EGEE middleware, gLite, and our experiences deploying an internationally federated research infrastructure in Australia. We will also present our plans for inter-operation with the APAC National Grid program and establishment of an Australian WLCG federation.ANU Archive Item Open Access Avoiding a Digital Dark AgeBurton, AdrianAdvances in information and telecommunications technology present opportunities and risks for research and research data. These advances are propelling us into a new age of research. The question is “Is this a golden age or a dark age for research information?