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.