The development process has begun!
The major development component of this grant is concerned with sustainable data relations: developing standardised and automated processes for importing data from our partners into the daao and exporting to Trove, the HuNi linked data project, Primo and other research focussed discovery services. Jo Croucher, our data manager is leading this element of the project and will be working with Alastair Weakley from Interaction Consortium.
A secondary component of this project cycle is a revision of our User Experience (UX) Design. Now that the new site is up and running we have a good sense of what elements of the site need improving. Olivia Bolton has been leading this component: conducting user testing and collating feedback from our members and working with House of Laudanum our UX designers on the site changes.
If all goes to plan the development work will be completed by end December. This gives us good time for importing the new data sets and testing our new integration systems. We already have test records on the DAAO from the VCA, Melbourne Uni’s Special collections, RMIT Design Archive and NVG. Work has also commenced on pulling in Paul Thomas’s Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth data. http://www.daao.org.au/projects/biennale-of-electronic-art-perth-beap/
Emily Wubben, our Melbourne project officer is doing an amazing job working with Melbourne University’s cultural collections to co-ordinate our efforts. She is also working on a project to expose 300 significant Artists Books held by Baillieu Library’s Special Collection. You can see her efforts here http://www.daao.org.au/projects/artists-books/. Emily will be posting on this blog about her work with Melbourne Uni’s Cultural collections soon.
Joanne Croucher and I have had a paper accepted at the upcoming Museums Australia Conference in Adelaide on ‘Creating connections with creative collections: Design and Art Australia Online’. Jo will represent us at this conference.
I’ll be going to Tasmania at the end of July to build on the work that Marie Sierra is doing negotiating relationships with Tasmanian Institutions. We hope to pilot some projects in this round with a view to a larger involvement with Tasmanian collections and researchers in the next grant cycle.
There is too much activity going on to list it all, but the best news is that DAAO is being used. New members are joining, site visits are up and DAAO data is growing every day.