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.

From left: Gillian, Kim & Liz (taken on Skype by Olivia)

Design & Art Australia Online is now in a flurry of exciting activity and development.  After months of working toward what seemed like a distant goal, suddenly it is June and the launch is within sight.  To give a little insight into how a team of only four, albeit an incredibly talented team of four, can achieve so much I thought I’d share this screen shot from Skype, taken at yesterday’s operations meeting.

Twice a week the team comes together to discuss the operational and strategic issues of the week. We check our status against our project plan, discuss problems and share ideas.  The meeting is structured largely around our accountabilities; Director’s update, Editorial, Data and Admin/Marketing.  For someone such as myself, who has joined DAAO after 10+ years in financial services, there has been quite a learning curve.  I will admit to not knowing many acronyms and terms early on, even today I learnt what a MOSCOW process is.

What makes this time so exciting is that we are now discussing a site we can see and test.  It’s moved from the conceptual to the real, and, while the journey is far from over it is incredibly satisfying to see all the hard work come together.

But back to the photo. No it is not a collective chipmunk impersonation.

For those that know the team personally, you’ll be aware that there is no lack of personality.  For example, I now know that if spontaneous dancing does occur in a meeting it is all standard practice.

Yesterday we were discussing the fact that we are all striving for success, we are all reaching for a high bar.  While we all have a lot on our plate, we know we will reach the bar because we are on fire (to coin a Fuller phrase.)  It may not be a smooth Fosby flop, it may be a us heaving ourselves over the bar as if we were escaping from prison.  Either way it will happen.

So the photo shows us happily holding on to the bar of achievement, Kilroy style, as we prepare ourselves for flight. Such is life within DAAO.

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

The DAAO is looking for an energetic and responsible Design Content Research Assistant to implement a short-term design content building project.

The main focus of the role will be mining and linking Australian design biographical content from specific partner catalogues and datasets into the DAAO.  The role will require a fair amount of working with databases so an eye for detail is necessary.

The position is Level 5 Casual, 0.6FTE for approximately 2.5 months (May to July 2011).

The position does not need to be Sydney-based, so those from other states who are willing and able to work remotely and keep in touch with the team online are very welcome to apply.

People interested in applying should email a C.V. and brief cover letter to Olivia Bolton (o.bolton (at) unsw.edu.au) as soon as possible as the project will begin in early May… how exciting!

Here is the position description

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

Moving on from my qualms about delicious’ shaky future, here’s a great article about alt-metrics and how academic scholarship and publishing is changing.

In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs.

These new forms reflect and transmit scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero–where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks–now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository–now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace alt-metrics.

From Alt-metrics, a manifesto

Speaking of moving scholarship online, our fine institution has just migrated the unsw repository of research output to a new user interface. Unsworks now has improved functionality and a more similar look and feel to existing library services. Explore it here.