Here is a date for your 2013 Calendar...
Flinders University will be hosting a ReDBox Community Day and a Half on 19/20 February 2013.
Please Register directly with Amanda Nixon either
by phone (08) 8201 5217
or email [amanda.nixon@flinders.edu.au] by the 8th February 2013.
Amanda will provide accommodation options and more information.
Places are limited, but there is no charge – due to ANDS sponsorship.
Draft agenda
Tuesday 19th February
Introduction
9.30 Welcome (Prof Richard Constantine, PVC (Information Services) and CIO, Flinders University)
9.40 Introduction/Housekeeping (Amanda Nixon, Flinders University)
9.50 Libraries and eResearch (Ian McBain, University Librarian, Flinders University)
10.15 ReDBox Review – the past 18 months (TBA, QCIF)
10.45 Morning tea
New Functionality coming into ReDBox
11.15 Data Management Planning Tool (Amanda Nixon)
11.45 Strategic Reporting (Vicki Picasso, University of Newcastle)
12.15 The Claw (TBA, University of Western Sydney)
12.45 Lunch
Different Institutions/Different Approaches
1.45 University of South Australia (Angelica Healey)
2.15 University of Adelaide (Cathy Miller)
2.45 UTS (Sharyn Wise)
3.15 Afternoon Tea
3.45 James Cook University (Marianne Brown)
4.15 Wrap up and close (Amanda Nixon)
Wednesday 20 February 2013
Introduction
9.15 Welcome/Housekeeping (Amanda Nixon)
9.20 ANDS – the Future? (TBA, ANDS)
9.40 Break out to groups – set up your own mini meetings… OR
ReDBox/RM users/Interested in links to data storage
10.45 Morning tea
11.15 Panel – ReDBox – the next 18 months
TBA (ANDS)
Peter Sefton (University of Western Sydney)
Megan Capicchiano (Deakin University)
12.00 Wrap up and close (Amanda Nixon)
Wednesday 19 December 2012
Tuesday 18 December 2012
Metadata Stores Community News #10
Apologies for any cross-posting
1. Congratulations! Overview of 2012: 22 Metadata Stores Projects with 22 start dates, Software choices: 13.5 ReDBox (0.5 is using Mint), 4 VIVO, 3 homegrown, 1 ORCA, 20 Steering Committees with 129 data management champions.
2. NLA/Trove registrations: A reminder of the link to the instructions for setting up an account for contributing records to the Trove and that you cc simon.pockley@ands.org.au in to your communications with the NLA. You can expect the TIM training session to be in mid-January (date to be announced).
3. ReDBox users: Duncan Dickinson has provided an overview of what ReDBox delivers with respect to Metadata Stores deliverables. More work is scheduled that will help fulfil requirements so it'd be worth looking at the overview and chasing up information you may need for your project. Please check and let Duncan know of edits/issues. You can even add comments to the document (pls put your name in the comment so that he knows where it came from).
4. Regular Clinics: The next Wednesday Metadata Stores surgery/clinic will be held on Wednesday January 9th 2012 at 10:00am (Melb time)- a reminder will be sent out on the Monday before with the log-in details.
Seasons Greetings to everyone and best wishes for the coming year...
Simon
1. Congratulations! Overview of 2012: 22 Metadata Stores Projects with 22 start dates, Software choices: 13.5 ReDBox (0.5 is using Mint), 4 VIVO, 3 homegrown, 1 ORCA, 20 Steering Committees with 129 data management champions.
2. NLA/Trove registrations: A reminder of the link to the instructions for setting up an account for contributing records to the Trove and that you cc simon.pockley@ands.org.au in to your communications with the NLA. You can expect the TIM training session to be in mid-January (date to be announced).
3. ReDBox users: Duncan Dickinson has provided an overview of what ReDBox delivers with respect to Metadata Stores deliverables. More work is scheduled that will help fulfil requirements so it'd be worth looking at the overview and chasing up information you may need for your project. Please check and let Duncan know of edits/issues. You can even add comments to the document (pls put your name in the comment so that he knows where it came from).
4. Regular Clinics: The next Wednesday Metadata Stores surgery/clinic will be held on Wednesday January 9th 2012 at 10:00am (Melb time)- a reminder will be sent out on the Monday before with the log-in details.
Seasons Greetings to everyone and best wishes for the coming year...
Simon
Thursday 13 December 2012
NLA Trove registration
If you have not yet registered with NLA/Trove please review the registration steps outlined in the post on Friday 7th December 2012.
Important new step: When you send emails to the NLA please cc simon.pockley@ands.org.au
The reason for asking that you do this is so that we (ANDS) can have a sense of who is doing what and when. That way we can time our training workshops to meet your needs and facilitate resolution of any delays you might be experiencing.
Best wishes
Simon
Important new step: When you send emails to the NLA please cc simon.pockley@ands.org.au
The reason for asking that you do this is so that we (ANDS) can have a sense of who is doing what and when. That way we can time our training workshops to meet your needs and facilitate resolution of any delays you might be experiencing.
Best wishes
Simon
Tuesday 11 December 2012
Software choices for Metadata Stores projects
In the October Metadata Stores Newsletter #9 there was a call for your rationales for choosing Metadata Stores software. The following rationales have been provided for sharing. If you have not already done so and would like to share yours, then please email a paragraph to be added to this (unordered) list:
University of Adelaide: The two candidate Metadata Store Solutions originating from academic institutions are very different in nature. ReDBox is an Australian developed Metadata Store focused on curating metadata within an institution. VIVO, originating from Cornell University, is much wider in scope aiming to use Semantic Web functionality to provide an overarching discovery and network building tool for researchers across institutions.
The comparative review examined the attributes of each system in terms of functionality, vendor capability, service and support, vision and cost. This document summaries that comparative review.
In general ReDBox can be considered to be a much smaller system in comparison to VIVO in terms of scope, complexity and vision. This lighter weight system is better focused on the needs of the University of Adelaide’s Research Metadata Store Project, with key advantages in the areas of complexity, workflow implementation and support. ReDBox overall represents a better fit for the needs of the Research Metadata Store Project - (Evaluation document attached).
The University of South Australia has evaluated a number of open source software solutions as part of the Research Metadata Store project. In order to ensure that UniSA has an enterprise-wide Research Metadata Store solution that not only meets our deliverables for the ANDS project but also fulfils the need for an overall metadata store solution, the Project Team has documented the complete set of ANDS requirements in addition to capturing all the UniSA requirements for a research metadata store then compared each open source software solution against the combined ANDS and UniSA requirements - (Evaluation document attached).
University of Queensland is developing custom software for its metadata store. Existing software that was available at the time did not complement other systems at the university and required non-trivial customisation to integrate. A custom approach gave the project more control over what functionality is available, how it is implemented and the timeline for delivery -- which was important for reducing the project risk, since many aspects of the project had never been done before. The approach requires more development resources, but it is expected the investment will result in a solution that is better aligned and evolves with the diverse and changing needs of the university.
University of Western Australia: UWA chose VIVO for its ANDS Metadata Store for several reasons: its potential to develop into a full ‘Research Profiles’ system, its use of Linked Data / Semantic Web technology, and the availability of Australian expertise at Melbourne, Griffith and QUT. We chose not to use an integrated repository/metadata store system like ReDBox, largely because we were already using a commercial product (DigiTool) for our publications repository. DigiTool itself was not suitable as an ANDS metadata store, and building an ANDS metadata store directly on to DigiTool was not an option.
The Australian National University’s reasoning for the adoption of Vivo is a little more complex than it first appears.
Our abstracted high level architecture is in appendix 2 of our project management plan and our choice of orca revolves around our need to have a store of some sort in our implementation. We have looked at a number of solutions
1) virtualising the store, i.e. pulling the data in real time from the various sources and building a display tool
2) using vivo as the display tool and simply pulling the data from a variety of sources and caching it in vivo
3) using orca as a backing store for data
We've come to the conclusion that a purely virtual store is not practical which means we need an interim store if only to store newly minted NLA party identifiers.
As we were already planning to use orca as a standalone collections registry populated from our data capture and seeding the commons projects it made sense to extend the use of orca rather than have another database.
Vivo we discounted because of its implicit organisational model - we did have it running with a very sparse set of data harvested from a number of sources, but we felt it was very person centric as opposed to research output centric
However our use of orca is pragmatic and designed to save us development time - there is no reason in our architecture why it could not be replaced by something else that did the job, and because we are using a very agile methodology we may yet do so should orca have performance problems.
It's our intention to then build a front end that gives a number of views and to see the core system effectively as middleware that supports a range of standard queries.
In that way the metadata store could be used as a source to populate individual research school's web pages in a standard manner to get a consistent view (and presentation) of the information across the institution.
University of New South Wales reviewed ReDBox, Vivo, MyTARDIS and the in house ResData. The evaluation was detailed and the conclusion was that the existing system ResData could be extended to include the required functionality and combined with Mint. However the other systems would require significant work to integrate with the existing systems.
University of Adelaide: The two candidate Metadata Store Solutions originating from academic institutions are very different in nature. ReDBox is an Australian developed Metadata Store focused on curating metadata within an institution. VIVO, originating from Cornell University, is much wider in scope aiming to use Semantic Web functionality to provide an overarching discovery and network building tool for researchers across institutions.
The comparative review examined the attributes of each system in terms of functionality, vendor capability, service and support, vision and cost. This document summaries that comparative review.
In general ReDBox can be considered to be a much smaller system in comparison to VIVO in terms of scope, complexity and vision. This lighter weight system is better focused on the needs of the University of Adelaide’s Research Metadata Store Project, with key advantages in the areas of complexity, workflow implementation and support. ReDBox overall represents a better fit for the needs of the Research Metadata Store Project - (Evaluation document attached).
The University of South Australia has evaluated a number of open source software solutions as part of the Research Metadata Store project. In order to ensure that UniSA has an enterprise-wide Research Metadata Store solution that not only meets our deliverables for the ANDS project but also fulfils the need for an overall metadata store solution, the Project Team has documented the complete set of ANDS requirements in addition to capturing all the UniSA requirements for a research metadata store then compared each open source software solution against the combined ANDS and UniSA requirements - (Evaluation document attached).
University of Queensland is developing custom software for its metadata store. Existing software that was available at the time did not complement other systems at the university and required non-trivial customisation to integrate. A custom approach gave the project more control over what functionality is available, how it is implemented and the timeline for delivery -- which was important for reducing the project risk, since many aspects of the project had never been done before. The approach requires more development resources, but it is expected the investment will result in a solution that is better aligned and evolves with the diverse and changing needs of the university.
University of Western Australia: UWA chose VIVO for its ANDS Metadata Store for several reasons: its potential to develop into a full ‘Research Profiles’ system, its use of Linked Data / Semantic Web technology, and the availability of Australian expertise at Melbourne, Griffith and QUT. We chose not to use an integrated repository/metadata store system like ReDBox, largely because we were already using a commercial product (DigiTool) for our publications repository. DigiTool itself was not suitable as an ANDS metadata store, and building an ANDS metadata store directly on to DigiTool was not an option.
The Australian National University’s reasoning for the adoption of Vivo is a little more complex than it first appears.
Our abstracted high level architecture is in appendix 2 of our project management plan and our choice of orca revolves around our need to have a store of some sort in our implementation. We have looked at a number of solutions
1) virtualising the store, i.e. pulling the data in real time from the various sources and building a display tool
2) using vivo as the display tool and simply pulling the data from a variety of sources and caching it in vivo
3) using orca as a backing store for data
We've come to the conclusion that a purely virtual store is not practical which means we need an interim store if only to store newly minted NLA party identifiers.
As we were already planning to use orca as a standalone collections registry populated from our data capture and seeding the commons projects it made sense to extend the use of orca rather than have another database.
Vivo we discounted because of its implicit organisational model - we did have it running with a very sparse set of data harvested from a number of sources, but we felt it was very person centric as opposed to research output centric
However our use of orca is pragmatic and designed to save us development time - there is no reason in our architecture why it could not be replaced by something else that did the job, and because we are using a very agile methodology we may yet do so should orca have performance problems.
It's our intention to then build a front end that gives a number of views and to see the core system effectively as middleware that supports a range of standard queries.
In that way the metadata store could be used as a source to populate individual research school's web pages in a standard manner to get a consistent view (and presentation) of the information across the institution.
University of New South Wales reviewed ReDBox, Vivo, MyTARDIS and the in house ResData. The evaluation was detailed and the conclusion was that the existing system ResData could be extended to include the required functionality and combined with Mint. However the other systems would require significant work to integrate with the existing systems.
Reminders: GoTo meetings: Today - Tues 11th Dec and Wed 12th Dec
Please remember
the RedBox NLA/Trove walkthrough is Tuesday 11th Dec 12:00pm (Melb time) see previous post for log-in details.
and
the regular Wednesday drop-in is Wednesday 12th Dec 10:00am (Melb time) see previous post for log-in details
the RedBox NLA/Trove walkthrough is Tuesday 11th Dec 12:00pm (Melb time) see previous post for log-in details.
and
the regular Wednesday drop-in is Wednesday 12th Dec 10:00am (Melb time) see previous post for log-in details
Friday 7 December 2012
How to set up your NLA Trove Account
For those who have yet to set up their accounts with the National Library of Australia (NLA), here is a reminder of the process.
There are prerequisites that must be met before contacting NLA.
Please be familiar with these training modules. Any questions, please ask.
From the NLA’s perspective you are the Contributor. To get your party records into Trove, the basic process - in sequence is:
Some useful documentation about the process for a Contributor to get their records into the Party Infrastructure is on the NLA wiki page . See the ‘Contributor Guide to the Party Infrastructure’.
If you have questions or just need clarification then,
There are prerequisites that must be met before contacting NLA.
- Have your ISIL code and contributor name
- Have records ready for harvesting (very important)
- Have a harvesting point
- Records are either in RIF-CS or EAC-CPF
- Records should be available for harvest via OAI
Please be familiar with these training modules. Any questions, please ask.
- http://ands.org.au/training/trove/trove-module1-a.html
- http://ands.org.au/training/trove/trove-module1-b.html
From the NLA’s perspective you are the Contributor. To get your party records into Trove, the basic process - in sequence is:
- You, the Contributor, have records to Contribute to the NLA Party Infrastructure
- The Contributor makes these records available for harvest via OAI-PMH in a schema that the NLA can process (RIF-CS or EAC-CPF)
- The Contributor provides to Trove the following details:
- Contributor name
- Contributor ISIL
- Contact person
- Schema used for records
- Base URL for harvesting by NLA via OAI-PMH
- With this information the Trove submits a request to the NLA’s IT Section to set up the Institution as a Contributor in Trove and the Trove Identities Manager (TIM) - (this can take a week or more to happen).
- When this has been done the Trove team will set up the NLA TEST Harvester to do a Test harvest of the records. These records are checked for content and if changes are required the Trove team will communicate with you.
- When any issues are resolved, Trove will do a full Test harvest and pass the records through the auto matching process and the records that pass the auto rules will be loaded to Trove TEST and the records that fail the auto match process will be loaded to the unmatched record queue in the TIM Beta system.
- The Contributor can then be given access to the TIM system to their un-matched records so they can manually check for existing names to match against or to create new records from their unmatched records. This access requires the Contributor to be a Trove registered user, by signing up to both the Trove production service ( http://trove.nla.gov.au/) and the Trove Test system (http://trove-test.nla.gov.au/) using the same user name, password and email address.
- If there are no issues with the records in TIM Beta and Trove Test , we will then complete the work and do a harvest into Trove and TIM, where the records will be publically available with their NLA party identifier.
- Trove will then set up a schedule to do automatic incremental harvest at a time and frequency that suits the Contributor. A party record is allocated an NLA party identifier when it passes the auto matching rules in the identity service processing and is displayed in Trove in the People and Organisation zone. For records that do not pass the auto matching rules the records are loaded to the Trove Identities Manager (TIM) where manually reviewing is required. When an unmatched record in TIM is matched to an existing identity or is used to create a new identity, then this record acquires a NLA identity and is displayed in Trove.
Some useful documentation about the process for a Contributor to get their records into the Party Infrastructure is on the NLA wiki page . See the ‘Contributor Guide to the Party Infrastructure’.
If you have questions or just need clarification then,
- Submit your enquiry through the Trove Contact us form and indicate your question is about contributing People records.
- Contact Simon Pockley 03 99020549, 0418575525 or Julie McCulloch 03 9905 6275,
0412 673 335 or Amir Aryani 02 6125 0586, 0478 401 224
Thursday 6 December 2012
ReDBox: Walk-through Curation Process: Tues 11th Dec 12:00pm AEDT
Toby O'Hara (UWS) has organised a walk-through of the curation process that is built into ReDBox, with an emphasis on the NLA-ID component where the Mint passes records to Trove/NLA and receives an NLA-ID back.
If you are interested in what ReDBox/Mint does out of the box, and the minimum configurations that are required to get NLA integration working - then this is for you.
Toby is expecting this to be a fairly technical discussion, relevant to the code and what code does what functions. Important to note: if anyone has rewritten the code with major customisations, and is having trouble, that's for a separate discussion.
Even if you've done this before, it might be worth joining in the conversation and adding tips and pointers that you have experienced yourself (UoN looking at you).
How to participate
1. Please join my meeting, 11/12/2012 at 12:00 PM AEDT.
https://www4.gotomeeting.com/join/199948127
2. Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) - a headset is recommended.
Or,
call in using your telephone. Dial 61290873701 Access Code: 199-948-127
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting
Meeting ID: 199-948-127
GoToMeeting® Online Meetings Made Easy®
Not at your computer?
Click the link to join this meeting from your iPhone®, iPad® or Android® device via the GoToMeeting app.
If you are interested in what ReDBox/Mint does out of the box, and the minimum configurations that are required to get NLA integration working - then this is for you.
Toby is expecting this to be a fairly technical discussion, relevant to the code and what code does what functions. Important to note: if anyone has rewritten the code with major customisations, and is having trouble, that's for a separate discussion.
Even if you've done this before, it might be worth joining in the conversation and adding tips and pointers that you have experienced yourself (UoN looking at you).
How to participate
1. Please join my meeting, 11/12/2012 at 12:00 PM AEDT.
https://www4.gotomeeting.com/join/199948127
2. Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) - a headset is recommended.
Or,
call in using your telephone. Dial 61290873701 Access Code: 199-948-127
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting
Meeting ID: 199-948-127
GoToMeeting® Online Meetings Made Easy®
Not at your computer?
Click the link to join this meeting from your iPhone®, iPad® or Android® device via the GoToMeeting app.
Tuesday 4 December 2012
Reminder Drop-in GoTo Meeting - Wednesday 5th Dec 10:00am (Melb Time)
Metadata Stores regular clinic/surgery - Wednesday 5th Dec 10:00am (Melb Time.
Meeting link: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/join/902515079
Or, call in using your telephone.
Dial +61 2 8355 1031
NEW Access Code: 902-515-079
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting
If you have already downloaded the client
NEW GoTo Meeting ID: 902-515-079
Meeting link: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/join/902515079
Or, call in using your telephone.
Dial +61 2 8355 1031
NEW Access Code: 902-515-079
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting
If you have already downloaded the client
NEW GoTo Meeting ID: 902-515-079