Current Projects

This project provides technical expertise to other APSR development projects. Areas of expertise include:

• Web application development
• Requirements analysis
• Database sustainabilty consultancy
• Graphic design
• User Interface design

The objectives of the CREW project are:

• to enable and enhance the outcomes of APSR web-based development projects,
• to integrate technically and graphically the outcomes of those initiatives, and
• to identify new and fresh possibilities and approaches for these projects.

Projects that have benefited from the CREW project include the Sustainability Guidelines for Australian Repositories project (SUGAR) and the Automated Obsolescence Notification System (AONS). This is not an independent project in itself, but rather an enabling project for the other APSR projects.

Contact: David.Berriman@apsr.edu.au

The RQF offers an opportunity for institutional repository managers. This document is a checklist for the functionalities institutional repositories will need to support the requirements of the RQF. It describes six areas; developing and supporting the RQF data model, supporting complex or non-text items, facilitating work flow for depositing academics and university administrators, managing groups and access, and enabling communications.

The Functional Checklist for Digital Repositories in the Research Quality Framework (RQF) is downloadable as a pdf (32Kb)

.Contact: Adrian Burton

This national project surveyed data-intensive communities with a view to establishing current capabilities for the storage, access, and long term management of research data. Awareness of sustainability issues and how these are being addressed were also canvassed. The project examined how available resources may be applied to sustainability issues for these communities. There is a focus on using APAC resources to work more closely with a number of the surveyed communities. APAC undertook a related project through the survey and documented eResearch infrastructure needs in data-intensive communities. Paul McNamara, on secondment from the ANU, coordinated the APSR project, working closely with Dr. Markus Buchhorn from APAC.

A report of the project is now available in pdf form (392kb).
Read the full Project proposal.

Contact: Paul McNamara

A tandem project to this one was Sustainable paths for Data-intensive Research Communities, at the University of Melbourne test-bed, under the management of Anna Shadbolt. The purpose of this project was to work directly with some of the data-intensive research communities at the University of Melbourne. The project aimed to conduct an audit of ten to twelve data-intensive research communities across a variety of disciplines, documenting the data management issues for each community. The project team worked more closely with a small number of these research communities to develop a framework for e-Research and sharing of best practice. The learning from this process was fed back to the national AERES project.

A report of this project is available in pdf form (599kb).

Contact: Anna Shadbolt

Cocoon is increasingly being used within the ANU institutional repository context as a rendering engine for more complex collections and provides a presentation layer above the repository layer. Launching some production exemplars of this technology to demonstrate its use in the preservation lifecycle of more complex digital objects is planned for mid 2006 and is significant in that DSpace is also expected to introduce this technology in its core distribution mid-late 2006. Exemplars to be launched include: People of the Rivermouth, Anthology of Australian Music, one or more Open Access journals and integration with ANU's ePress facility.
The DSpace statistical extension to allow the on-demand generation of meaningful statistical information for DSpace administrators and Collection owners allows data collected and stored in real time to be queried and presented in various ways. Since the data produced by the System is XML, it can be visualised in any format, one of which (also developed by the ANU DSpace team) is an SVG graph generator system running under Cocoon.

Contact Scott Yeadon.

This project is designed to extend the pioneering work already done on advanced rendering of complex objects stored in DSpace, and using Cocoon as the publishing framework "above" DSpace. Early work on the Anthology of Australian Music and People of the Rivermouth will be used as the basis for new projects.

Contact: Peter Raftos

This pilot project will entail working with university electronic presses to develop online journal publishing frameworks that incorporate repositories such as DSpace as the relevant storage layer. This will be based on prior work done on complex object collections, and within the context of open source online journal publication systems being developed elsewhere.

Contact: Peter Raftos and Fides Datu Lawton (UTS)

Investigation and development work will be carried out to leverage APAC resources and technologies in improving the repository infrastructure in order to cope with expected data volume increases and a variety of data formats.

Contact: Peter Raftos

Word processing formats are a major problem for digital repositories.  This project considers the conversion of documents into a better format for long-term storage and provides a prototype web application that will bring together a range of services for scholarly authors. More>>>
See working papers: Preservation of Word-Processing Documents and Preservation of TeX/LaTeX Documents.

Contact: Ian Barnes

The objective of this project was to develop a requirements specification for preservation metadata.  The specification wouldl be based on the PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) final report, the Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata.  The project worked to develop a list of mandatory elements for a specified range of formats, developed a functional specification and supported the implementation of the model at the partners repositories.  Kevin Bradley managed the project and Bronwyn Lee was the business analyst.

View the final report.

APSR has developed a solution to help the preservation of data for long term access. AONS (Automated Obsolescence Notification System) is a software system that works in conjunction with the leading open-source repository platforms (DSpace and Fedora/Fez) to automatically notify repository managers about the file formats of digital resources in the repository and alerting them to problems that they may cause for long-term preservation. AONS emails the notification repository manager whenever problems are encountered.

AONS will be released into the public domain for use when the second phase of development in 2007 is completed. The system was taken through to its successful first phase of development by the lead programmer, Joseph Curtis.

Contact: Chris Blackall

View the Systems Documentation, September 2006

This survey of research data held in universities was undertaken in mid-2005 and covers data sets held at the Australian National University, the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland. The Survey of Data Collections: a research project undertaken for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories by Kevin Bradley of the National Library of Australia and Margaret Henty of the Australian National University was published in December 2005.

The survey is available in full as either html or pdf (451kb).

Contact: Margaret Henty

Sustainable Paths for Data-intensive Research Communities, at the University of Melbourne test-bed, was conducted in tandem with the AERES Project. Its purpose was to work directly with some of the data-intensive research communities at the University of Melbourne. The project aimed to conduct an audit of ten to twelve data-intensive research communities across a variety of disciplines, documenting the data management issues for each community. The project team worked more closely with a small number of these research communities to develop a framework for e-Research and sharing of best practice. The learning from this process was fed back to the national AERES project.

Contact: Anna Shadbolt

View the final report, available in pdf (599kb) August 2006.

Fez, a flexible, digital repository and workflow management system, was released in November 2005 by UQ staff under the GPL open source license. Fez 1.2 is the latest version. The Fez software is written using PHP and MySQL and works as a front-end and administration tool to Fedora, an excellent tool for managing objects and the relationships between them. In a Fedora repository, objects can be communities, collections, and records. Records can belong to both collections and communities.

The most recently released Fez software is available for free download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/. Details of the software, documentation and further planned development can be found in the Fez Wiki at http://dev-repo.library.uq.edu.au/wiki.

Contact: Belinda Weaver

Fieldworkers typically collect data in an ad-hoc way during fieldwork, leading to problems with data management and consistent recording of metadata. This often results in patchy and highly variable metadata quality at the time of submission of data to a digital repository. It can be very difficult or even impossible to reconstruct some of this information at a later date, yet these resources are often unique and unrepeatable records of highly significant events collected at considerable expense of researcher time, effort and resources.

This project has aimed to assist the workflow of researchers who collect digital data during fieldwork by analysing field methodologies and providing tools and resources to support the collection and long-term sustainability of data and metadata created in the field.

This work has culminated in a conference and workshop: The Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork: from creation to archive and back conference and workshop were held at the University of Sydney on December 4-6, 2006, and showcased a number of projects that have been developing innovative and sustainable ways of managing such data.

Contact: Linda Barwick

APSR is developing a set of sustainability guidelines to assist repository planning, creation and management. The project will deliver an online information service for people seeking guidance on digital sustainability issues. The guidelines will be developed as a prototype and tested with reference to digital repository projects within and beyond the University of Sydney. Project outcomes will offer an example service provision mechanism that might be further developed through partnerships within and beyond Australia.

Contact: Rowan Brownlee

Development and testing of the interoperable core for repositories using iSpheresImage.

Contact: Daniel Burn

Investigation of a sustainable model for complex multimedia publication through application to the Wanagga, Songs of North Western Australia multimedia publication project at Sydney University Press.

Contact: Sten Christensen