The ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) Discovery Service has had a branding makeover. The ARROW project concluded in December 2008, and the new name is ARO (Australian Research Online) – a fortuitously homophonic new name.

Update your bookmarks as the URL has changed although at present a redirect is handling traffic. Similarly the email address has changed for contacts too.

The discovery service now has three government contributors:

• Defence Science and Technology Organisation Scientific Publications Online
• Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries eResearch Archive
• South Australia Health

…  and in the future we can look forward to Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) content.

Australian Research Online – http://research.nla.gov.au

An openSearch plugin is available so you can add this to the drop down list of search targets in your browser toolbar (Firefox and IE), and an embed code snippet is provided for those wishing to add a search box to their website. — Search and Access page

On 21st April, the World Digital Library was launched. The World Digital Library brings together digitised primary documents including rare books, maps, manuscripts, films and photographs, from countries around the world, with content available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Inspired by James Billington from the Library of Congress in 2004, it has been developed the LC and UNESCO, with the aims of promoting international understanding, expanding non-English and non-western content online and to contribute to research and education.

Besides the digitised primary documents and recordings, the site will also have videos from curtors explaining their importance and what they show about the culture of that country and that time.

WDL currently has 32 partners from around the world, which they are hoping to increase to 60 by the end of 2009.

The vast majority of content comes from Europe and Latin America, with little from South America or Oceania at this time.  There is a little content about Australia, butwhat is there is well worth investigating.  I highly recommend that you do.

In early 2008, Flickr launched the Commons to showcase the public photo collections of libraries, museums and archives from around the world. The Library of Congress was the first to start adding their collections and New York Public Library (probably) the most recent.

The two main objectives of the Commons are to increase access to publicly-held collections and to enable the general public to contribute information and knowledge about the images.

Christmas on HMAS Benalla, 1944 by Clifford Bottomley

So far there are 17 institutions contributing photographs including from Australia, the Australian War Memorial (photostream), Powerhouse Museum (photostream) and the State Library of New South Wales (photostream).  Other contributing institutions are from Portugal, New Zealand, France, Canada, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

The image included here is from the Australian War Memorial’s collection. In the Commons, all contributing institutions declare that the images they contribute have “no known copyright restrictions“.  The link through to the AWM’s site showed that for this particular image the copyright had expired. Having a blanket statement for images may be simpler for the institutions involved and Flickr too I suppose, but for the user it would a great help to have more specific information about rights if it is available.

There are some beautiful images from George Eastman House’s collection in the Commons, including colourful fashion magazine cover images and layouts and postcards.

You could spend hours browsing through these collections. While you are there, don’t forget to add tags and comments.

A two-day workshop on the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is being held on the 4th and 5th of December at the University of Sydney.

Themes for this workshop are:

• scholarly publishing in the electronic environment
• business models and service frameworks
• establishing and maintaining publications and services
• experience sharing and establishing an Australian PKP community, and
• technical developments.

The PKP is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research.

More details on this workshop are available from the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories web site, including registration form.

Registrations close on the 27th of November.

A very new blog has been launched to communicate developments in an ARROW project that focuses on managing names in institutional repositories. The project is just starting up and comments are being sought on a draft project plan.

The NicNames Project

We’ve had a few posts about repositories lately, and here’s another one. Research repositories are playing a major role in furthering open access to research papers, but of course they are not the only factor in the open access movement.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science have organised the first ever, Open Access Day to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

Open Access Day – October 14, 2008

Although there is some inaccuracy, it is good to see reporting on the work Australian universities are undertaking in research repositories and the open access movement.

Access remains an open secret by Bernard Lane | The Australian

If you are wondering about the innacuracy..
Fedora was not developed by the University of Queensland. UQ developed Fez to work on top of Fedora providing a user interface and workflow management to the underlying digital repository.

Anyone interested in the development of research repositories might like to go to this upcoming ARROW event in Brisbane.

“Repositories : into the future” will be held at Customs House in Brisbane on Tuesday the 14th October. It is followed the next day by ARROW Community Day at Queensland University of Technology.

Details: News and Events (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World)

Neil Godfrey’s blog has been quiet for awhile, but it seems he is back and busy reflecting on repositories and metadata. Many will not find repository metadata terribly exciting, but Neil’s writing is very accessible and if you are new to repositories and attempting to come to terms with metadata requirements his metareflections posts are helpful.

“Continuing here to share my “education in metadata” — and since I’m still
discussing the early months, the post may be of interest to other peoples
beginning their metadata journeys too . . . .” — Metalogger

September is a lovely time of year to visit Brisbane..
And this September, you can attend the Open Access and Research Conference and hear speakers on topics such as evolving publishing models, repository management, e-Research, policy development, and legal and technical issues.

Early bird registration is available until the 25th of July. The conference will be held at the Stamford Plaza.

Beach in the city @ Brisbane, Australia by timparkinson

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/104219504/