Many of you, particularly those of you on the Editorial Board and the Art- and Design Research Groups will have been receiving  quite a few emails from Olivia and I this week; informing you of consultation processes and timelines; providing reports and asking for feedback, updates on how work is proceeding on the MREII grant.

Others will have been talking to Zina Kaye, our consultant Business Analyst. I have now managed to have a lovely informative telephone conversation with everyone except two of our CIs who are currently overseas. Its been great to finally chat to everyone, it grounds the project back to its core business of research. I’ve been learning so much about Australian art history. I had no idea how little I knew. its wonderful to be on learning curve.

A lot of the recent communication frenzy is due to the fact that the jewel in the DAAO crown, Olivia Bolton, is about to go on her first holiday in way too long and so we are both finalising matters requiring her core knowledge before she goes off for a wonderful relaxing  email free month in France. It will calm down once Olivia goes at end September.

The project is really gearing up. We now have a Data Manager, Jo Croucher, who will work with us for 2 days a week until Christmas. Jo is seconded to us from UNSW library is a very able and tech savvy librarian who is very proficient in metadata organisation. She has come on board just in time as she will be crucial to our process of metadata field extension and refinement.

Over the next few weeks, you will find more activity happening on the Research Finding page as we start loading up summaries of your feedback to various tasks. By communicating to each other through google docs by way of questionnaires and forms, shared documents and then feeding them back into the blog, I am hoping to make the processes of our collaboration as transparent as possible. We also have the side benefit of generating documentation as we go.  I have posted up a table on the Research Results page that shows how CIs have been organised into groups that provide different resources to the DAAO over the life of the grant.

(BTW: Apologies to those members of the Art Advisory group that received a questionnaire with a repeat of block text in a section- working in those tiny workflow boxes in google forms is as bad as some of the text boxes in the back end of the DAAO.  Our proofer will pick up such errors in future!)