Content, Compliance, Collaboration and Complexity: Creating and Sustaining Information

Since the early nineties, information management
researchers at the eScholarship Research Centre
(ESRC) and its predecessor units at the University
of Melbourne have been involved in exploring and
utilising the capabilities of emerging digital and
networking technologies in the provision of scholarly
information infrastructure. The approach has been to
identify the archival, library and scholarly principles
embedded in traditional reference tools and then
explore how they may be re-engineered and reimagined with new information and communication
technologies. This has led to a number of
collaborative research projects with scholars and
cultural institutions which involve building new
digital information infrastructure respectful of
diversity and complexity, and allow the exploration
of new roles for various stakeholders in the processes
to add richness, improve productivity and enable
sustainability.
The latest such project involved working with
the Australian Women’s Archives Project on
the redevelopment of the Australian Women’s
Register as collaborative information infrastructure.
Technological development entailed:
- developing harvesting services by which content
from the Register is made part of the National
Library of Australia’s exciting new Trove discovery
service,1
using the Open Archives Initiative
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)2
and the new Encoded Archival Context (EAC)3
metadata standard, and
- investigating the deployment of Web 2.0 tools into
the system to allow for more efficient and effective
content creation by community contributors.
This half-day workshop will use the redevelopment
of the Australian Women’s Register to explore
issues around creating sustainable information
infrastructure for the digital humanities. Questions
around the themes of content, compliance,
collaboration and complexity will be raised,
illustrated with examples, and discussed with
workshop participants. For example:
- Content – What new roles may the various
stakeholders play creating and sustaining digital
and networked information infrastructure? What
impact does that have on the existing practices and
systems of historical scholars, archivists, librarians
and other information management professionals?
What place does editorial and authority control
have?
- Compliance – What kind of standards should
the community look to influence and/or develop?
What are the benefits of standards compliance?
What are the costs?
- Collaboration – What new collaborations
are made possible with the new technologies?
What new dependencies? How are collaborations
sustained? How are collaborative information
networks made resilient and robust?
- Complexity – What information models
support diversity and complexity? How can the
development of open and interoperable systems be
facilitated? What organisational and social factors
mitigate their development?
Presenters
Joanne Evans is a Research Fellow at the University
of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre and
has been responsible for the design, development
and deployment of the Centre’s archival information
systems in humanities and cultural heritage projects.
With qualifications and experience in information
management, recordkeeping and archiving, and
systems development, her research interests lie
in exploring ways in which library and archives
principles are applied into scholarly practices in
order to meet the challenges of the digital and
networked age particularly for the humanities, arts
and social sciences. Joanne has also been involved
with recordkeeping and resource discovery metadata
standards development as part of working groups
within Standards Australia’s IT 21/7 Committee and
with the Australian Society of Archivist’s Committee
on Descriptive Standards.
Nikki Henningham is a Research Fellow in the School
of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne
and is the Executive Officer for the Australian
Women’s Archives Project. She completed her PhD, a
study of gender and race in Northern Australia during
the colonial period, in the Department of History at
the University of Melbourne in 2000. Since then,
Digital Humanities 2010
23
she has taught in a wide range of undergraduate
subjects, including world history, film and history
and Australian history, and has conducted research
for a variety of projects, including the Australian
Women’s Archives Project. She has research interests
in the general area of Australian women’s history,
with a particular focus on women and sport, women
and oral history and the relationship between the
keeping of archives and the construction of history.
In 2005, she received the National Archives of
Australia’s Ian Mclean Award for her work in this
area.
Half day workshop: Morning, 6 July.
Notes
1. Trove is the National Library of Australia’s new discovery
service, providing a single point of access to resources held
in Australia’s memory institutions and incorporating rich
contextual metadata from a variety of sources. See http://t
rove.nla.gov.au/.
2. OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a
lightweight harvesting protocol for sharing metadata between
services developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It defines a
mechanism for harvesting metadata records from repositories
based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport
Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) in support
of new patterns for scholarly communication. See http://ww
w.openarchives.org/pmh/.
3. Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and
Families (EAC-CPF) is a metadata standard for the description
of individuals, families and corporate bodies which create,
preserve, use, are responsible for, or are otherwise associated
with records. Its purpose is to standardize the encoding of
descriptions of agents and their relationships to resources and
to one another, to enable the sharing, discovery and display of
this information. See http://eac.staatsbibliothek-be
rlin.de/.