Hi all,

A lot of the focus of this year’s project is to begin cementing closer ties with Melbourne institutions, specifically, University of Melbourne, RMIT, Deakin and Swinburne.

I had a very productive day down in Melbourne on Monday where I met with Jaynie Anderson from University of Melbourne and Harriet Edquist from RMIT to get the ball rolling on exposing some of the incredibly significant collections that these Universities hold.

We have begun hiring our Melbourne staff and the first cab of the rank is Emily Wubben who will be co-ordinating the ingestion and interoperation of collections at Melbourne University. Emily is ideally suited to this task.

She completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in 2011, with first class honours. She has worked with the Cultural Collections of the University of Melbourne in various projects and in 2009 she undertook an internship with the International Art Curatorial Department of the National Gallery of Victoria.  In 2011, as the first recipient of the University of Melbourne’s Museums and Collections Award, Emily travelled to England and completed an internship with the Museum Collections of the University of Birmingham. She is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne.

Its very exciting to finally being working the wealth of quality content that both UMelb and RMIT hold. Its also great to get to go down to Melbourne occasionally for work! I love lunching at Mr Tulk!

Here is a picture of Emily, so you can put face to name. Welcome Emily and welcome to our new Melbourne partners!

Our new Digital Content Project Officer, Emily Wubben

Hello All,

DAAO is back and ready for business again. Olivia and I are back after very restful breaks and currently in the process of setting up our new offices, hiring staff and returning emails. All is going smoothly in our first week. A good sign.

Its nice to start the year with some good news, so here it is. As well as being successul in our LIEF grant, DAAO was also part of the Australian Cultural DataSets Consortium which was successful in winning a NECTAR Virtual Laboratories grant (Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI): Unlocking and Uniting Australia’s Cultural Data). This consortium was led by Prof Deb Verhoeven of Deakin Uni. Deb is also a CI on our LIEF grant and a member of DAAO’s Management Committee.

I’ll post more on Virtual Lab project (VL)  once the project is up and running in a couple of months.

Please note, this year Olivia and I are both working only three days a week. Currently MON-WED. We both have other projects happening in our other days, so will be unable to reply to DAAO queries outside of our DAAO hours. We will, however have a full-time senior Data Manager on deck and a part-time admin assistant, so we are confident our reduced hours (due to budget constraints) won’t impact on our ability to get the job done efficiently.

Schedule for MARCH:

-Set Up office and hire staff in Sydney and Melbourne

-Finalise MIA and get accounts active.

-Project Planning- set benchmarks and schedule for project

-negotiate with Suppliers- review technical specifications of site

-Liaise with CIs.

-Set up Advisory Committees.

-First trip to Melbourne to meet with CIs and breif/hire staff.

Its great to be back and we are really looking forward to this consolidation year on the DAAO and to incorporating our new partners into the project.

This site is very new and technically quite complex. Its normal on complex sites that bugs will appear from time to time.

So don’t worry, if a few links don’t work or if some of the display looks odd from time to time, we are working on it

[November 2011 update ] We generally fix things very quickly, however over the summer break, Olivia and I will be taking a much deserved break and so won’t be able to respond to bugs as promptly as we normally do.

Please report any bugs you have found, or any parts of the site’s functionality or navigation that  confuses  you in the comments below. We will fold this feedback into our continuing development of the site. Please feel free to also tell us what to love and what you find useful.

Hi All

The Sydney Morning Herald did a little story on our incredible administrator, Kim Goodwin last weekend.  Kim was the inaugural winner of the Nick Waterlow Scholarship in Art Administration. For those who want to read on http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/from-tragedy-comes-artistic-new-life-20110423-1ds0n.html

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while. What with data migration, site building, interoperability negotiations and stitching up our next LIE, blogging became priority c

quick update;

data migration is more or less complete. We are just mainly ‘cleaning up’ now. Data Migration would have to be one of the most intense work experiences i’ve ever known. You learn so much about your  data and all the really grunty bits of data organisation. Huge learning curve for all of us and tremendously exciting- but also exhausting. I imagine Liz will post on the process sooner or later. ( She’s been quite heroic! – We love our data dudes at the DAAO!)

site building : we are working with editing interface now- bells and whistles are being attached each day. Alastair from IxC, (our developers) is an island of calm in an sea of activity tickets that fly around in the online project management system.  All appears to be happening more or less on time. all good there.

LIEF and interoperation: It is becoming apparent that we have a pressing need to develop some seriously efficient  automated and semi-automated  work flow tools for interoperating with large datasets. All the collections and research insitutions  I have met get the usefulness of our project and how it will expose quality datasets to eachother. Consequently,  everyone is signing on.  I was in Melbourne last week and was overwhelmed with how many major resources there are in Melbourne alone. We will be working very closely with many Victorian research and collection institutions in the next round. Its is very exciting and will enhance our research capacity enormously.

and finally! here are some identity concepts to comment on.

Both are still in development and both have been presented to Management Committee  and DAAO production teams (last Friday).  I won’t disclose our thoughts as yet, so as not to colour any opinions.  Comments are open. let us know what you think.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

in context:

and another:

and in context.

Yesterday we had a our ‘kick- off ‘ meeting with our new developers ‘The Interaction Consortium‘ – known as IxC for short. This officially inauguarates the building stage of the project.

Greg Turner (Director, PhD and Technical Information Architect among other things) drove the meeting that was attended by the DAAO project team, Lead CI Prof Ross Harley and our trusty site designers, House of Laudanum and Alastair Weakley ( another Director of IxC, who also has a PhD and is also terribly clever and experienced at developing cutting edge data driven sites).

Greg re-establishing definitions of success for project.

It was very exciting to finally get everyone in a room together and to plan the build. Everyone is the room is so committed to making the new DAAO a real example of best practice E- research. There is something so wonderful about saying things like’ so we’ll have completed data migration by March’ , or we’ll be ‘editing data  in the site in April’ , ‘we’ll be testing most functionality in May’.

check the focus in the room. No Ross is not asleep, he is deep in thought.

So watch this space! there’ll be lots to show and tell soon.

As part of the process of opening up the DAAO to the structures and benefits  that the internet has to offer, we are moving to Creative Commons Licensing system. From May 1 all text contributions will be licenced under Creative Common Licence.

This is a small step that has big benefits.

Its a small step because our existing Contributor and End-User Licence Agreements are already Creative Commons licences in spirit, in as much as our current licences allow others to use and share our content, so long as they attribute back to us and that our work is not used for commercial purposes. However, our licence does not say that anywhere near so clearly and many are confused by the legalese of the current licence. This is a problem if we want to collaborate with other institutions in sharing our data. We must have clear and easy to understand processes and human readable licences that embody the spirit of our project- and the spirit of our project is to enhance research and foster innovative collaborations around Australian Art and Design.   Creative Commons is “a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” http://creativecommons.org.au/ Creative Commons is part of of the ethos of openness and innovation in which the DAAO places itself- front and centre.

The Creative Commons equivalent of our existing contributor’s agreement is called an Attribution-Non Commercial Share- Alike 3.0 Australia Licence  (or a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 for short)

Click the link to see how at easy to understand the Creative Commons version of our agreement is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

There is, of course, also the legal code version http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode.  (Even this is well written and user friendly legal code).

The big benefits? By moving to Creative Commons licences we move to a well-known, community supported, plain English system that is becoming the standard within e-research and the GLAM ( Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector). By being clear about what the rules of use of, and contribution to, our site are, we make it easier for other institutions, particularly museums and art galleries to inter-operate with us, and in so doing enable our content to reach larger cohort of researchers. It also facilitates new data sets being  exposed to each other and that opens up the door to new  research questions and new approaches to art and design research.

I’ll finish this little post with a link to a talk that Mike Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy  from the Smithsonian Institution, to explain and champion the value of the commons to research. http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/m-4402558 (Thanks to Liz for sending me the link).

For further questions on the changeover to Creative Commons, please read our FAQ document.

Creative Commons Change Over FAQ

Happy New Year!

We’re back! well Olivia and I are. We’ve had  great holidays  ( I went bush and did some birdwatching, Olivia hung in Sydney and did very little)  and we now are now refreshed and ready for our big year ahead.

First stop (as always)  is the whiteboard, where I have been plotting out our project map for the next six or so months.  As soon as our new Admin Assistant starts, this rough diagram will be turned into a  usable project map and we’ll post on the Project Map page.

The big thing to do right now  is get our new staff organised. This year we will be hiring quite a few people: a developer to build the site ( this process is en train now), a new administrative assistant ( interviews  on Wednesday!) a series of project facilitators to organise the new content coming to the site; and we have also decided to expand Liz Stokes’s role in the project. Liz , who is completing a Masters in Information Management, will be taking on the role of Data Administration Officer now that the legendary Jo Croucher has had to resume her normal duties at the UNSW library. Luckily Jo will remain involved in our project  in the capacity of data management consultant. We are very grateful to Maude Francis , Manager, Library Repository Services in this regard. Maude is Jo’s supervisor and has been immensely supportive of our Project. I swear, we are just surrounded by great people !

Ok I have lots of planning to do. Will post more when details emerge.  Watch this space! Its going to be busy this year.

all the best

Gillian

We are currently seeking feedback from  Key Users/Contributors about how we are expanding certain areas of data capture in the database. Below is a short (6 min) video in which Jo Croucher (Our Data Manager) and I talk through some of the issues that we are using this abridged version of database to test.  Those of you who have been asked to test this have been sent an email.

Click here to see  AbridgedSchemaTest2

Feedback notes:

Friday; Feedback two CIs/Editorial Board Members.

Negative ( which is a good thing when trying to solve a problem!)

Too much information on works? is measurement necessary?

Too many stubs will be generated if we create record files for each ROLE associated with the production of works ( particularly in design)? Ie. we don’t need a record for Kambrook associated with Musset’s kettle. Just need to be able to note that Kambrook  made it. ?

Requests for clear citation policy (I agree but  this is an editorial Board issue- over to you!)

Positive( also useful)

Like the way that works can be dividied into parts- helps with complex works.

Like the way that Roles will now be searchable.   Also appreciate the inclusion of curators and arts professionals.

Appreciate the logic of associating medium with work, rather than a person.  So person  + Role and Medium +work.

Tuesday; CI x2  ( I CI also Ed board)

Measurement is important and should stay as field for design objects. ( 1)

Both want clear citation and additional reading policies.

Issues with category confusion over medium- ie Musset eg. Is Industrial design of the same order as Plastics etc… (totally right- catgeories get covered by TAGs and medium is medium and relates to a specific work.)

Agree that we don’t need records for every associate- we need to define primary roles ( ie Creator, curator etc)  who get full records and secondary roles ( ie Kambrook in the Musset eg) who don’t.

Huge meeting last Thursday with DAAO core team (Jo, Olivia and me) and the House of Laudanum team ( Zina, Snow and Lotte (who skyped in from Amsterdam).

Snow talking us through some of the ways we can automate data entry making the task less onerous and more accurate.

We talked a lot about the contributor- that is the person who will write accurate quality biographies and enter accurate relevant data in the metadata fields. When we extend the schema- we are also asking people to enter in more data- to make a greater commitment to the DAAO.  We have to make it worth their while. We can think of this extra value along two different paths: the satisfaction one gets at interacting with good design and seeing a change being made to a record in real-time; and the additional value one gets from being part of a community that is relevant and useful to you.  In the image above, Snow is talking us through how a semi- automated data entry system could help ease the burden of data entry on the contributor. For instance, imagine if you could just cut and paste an exhibitions list into one field, rather than entering every exhibition into a single field?  Too much data entry is placing a big obstacle to to contributing to the DAAO. However, each decision we make has consequences.

If we allow cutting and pasting exhibitions into one field-how will that affect exhibition search results? Could we find a system that structures the data automatically?  For instance, we are thinking about using Open Calais to help use semantically structure the biography text fields so that much of the metadata fields can be automatically populated from the biography text.  Using semantic web technologies (which is important in terms of future proofing our site)  also has implications for the structure of our database.

Only one week back and Olivia is as focused as ever. Lotte on the lap top is holding up well, given that it is 10pm Amsterdam time.

There are always compromises made in the design process- who we do focus on- the contributor ( the person who produces, checks and updates the content) or the user? Of course,  ideally they would overlap considerably (think social media)- but our research shows that they are pretty disparate groups at the moment- which is why ‘community building’ is so pivotal in projects like this.  At this stage, we need to think a lot about the experience of getting content onto the site as we need more content- and it needs to be authorative, up-to date and comprehensive. There is no user without a contributor.

There is lots to do, but the DAAO is in many ways still in its infancy- we can plan for the future, by making priority lists. This process is sometimes called MoSCoW- Must-Should-Could-Want. Because we are developing the project in a modular fashion, we can assign some things as CANs and WANTS and develop them later and write new grants to develop them with different partners. For instance, it would be brilliant to have a ‘save search and annotate’ feature in this iteration of the DAAO, but can we afford it? Is it the most important thing now? or would we rather try and get images into the site? (User research says Images gets Must, Save search and annotate gets a Could).  All of these features that we want go into the technical specification which we hand over to the Developer and we work with them to get as far down our priority list as we can without compromising the quality and functionality of the site.

More soon!