This week the new-look ARROW Discovery Service was launched featuring faceted browsing, tag clouds and access to more statistics such as the most popular authors and institutions.  The ARROW Discovery Service includes metadata records harvested from institutional research repositories across Australia and from the Australasian Digital Thesis Program. Faceted searching enables results to be refined [...]

Librarians in research and academia are keeping a close eye on changes to Research Assessment under the new Government. Michael Jubb from the UK based Research Information Blog has a post about how the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) compares to what’s happening in the UK – [...]

In today’s Higher Education supplement there are two articles, here and here, dealing with the replacement to the now defunct RQF process. The replacement is called Excellence in Research for Australia, and will be jointly crafted by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.  These also relate to the [...]

On Library Lovers’ Day I attended Open Access Collections at Customs House in Brisbane. This was an APSR event held in association with QULOC and the University of Queensland. I found the presentations very stimulating, especially Peter Murray-Rust’s in which he talked about open data and highlighted some useful sites to investigate further. It was [...]

Alexis Madrigal at Wired Science reports that Google will start hosting terabytes of open source research data at http://research.google.com. The storage will be free to scientists and freely accessible to all.  The project is called Palimpsest and one of the planned datasets is the Hubble Space telescope data – all 120 terabytes. Google to Host [...]

Future of the Book is working with Digital Library Federation on “what could become a major iniative aroudn the question of mass digitization..”. The goal of the project “is to shed light on the big questions about future accessibility and usability of analog culture in a digital, networked world.” They have run invited brainstorm sessions [...]

Alison Hunter from the University of Southern Queensland has established a Google Group for Australian and New Zealand repository managers. “This Group was set up following a meeting at Educause Australasia 2007, where there was an interesting discussion about creating an inclusive national group of people involved in managing institutional repositories. Those present didn’t want [...]

Okay, “standards” might be a bit strong. But Library of Congress Marc to Dublin Core proposals do not work with Repositories. And the reason is that Library collections have a different purpose and function from Repository collections. Some examples. 110, 111, 710 and 711 all map to dc:creator according to loc’s Marc to DC crosswalk. [...]

Attendance at the recent Information Online conference in Sydney brought home to me the fact that university libraries around Australia are still somewhat in the dark about the whole RQF (Research Quality Framework) which will be imposed by the federal government in 2008. The problem seems to lie in a government which is willing to [...]

I recently had an interesting experience from an academic friend of mine who, on learning that I worked on team involved with repository development, hit me hard over the head with all that she thought was absolutely evil about repositories. It’s a bit of a shock having a friend you think you are helping turn [...]