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

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.

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

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 by institution, subject, resource type, date or creator.

If you are looking for Australian research, the ARROW Discovery Service is a great option to get started. The majority of records do link through to online versions of papers, and email alerts can be set up if you need to monitor research in a topic area. But at this stage I can’t see any sign of RSS feeds.

The service has also made available a search plugin if you want to add this as a search option to your browser search box.

ARROW is seeking feedback including suggestions for improvements. Send an email with “Feedback” in the subject line to arrow(at)nla(dot)gov(dot)au.

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 particularly interesting to hear about scholarly publishing and accessibility from the point of view of a chemist. Later in the day we also heard from other academics in civil engineering and inorganic materials research about their experience with repositories at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. These
tied in nicely with Danny Kingsley’s discussion of her research into the institutional/disciplinary barriers affecting take up rates of repositories by researchers.

We also heard from Leanne Harvey (formerly DEST, not sure whereabouts in the Ministries she will be in future) about the Australian Government’s accessibility framework and that there is no news yet about what will replace the RQF, and from Anne Fitzgerald and Scott Kiel-Chisholm about the OAK Law project and the legal relationships between authors, repositories, publishers and users.

The panel session with repository managers was informative, but I missed the very last presentation by Kevin Stranack on the Public Knowledge Project. Colleagues tell me I would have enjoyed it. I’m hoping that one will be available as a video from the APSR site in the near future. The presentations are available already.
Danny Kingsley’s paper is also available in full from the VALA 08 program.

200210 customs house image by superciliousness. Used under a Creative Commons licence. Some rights reserved.