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.