Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA)

• Background
• ORCA at the University of Sydney
• University of Sydney ORCA Reference Group Website
• APSR ORCA website
• ORCA areas of activity
  • Communications forums
  • Training
  • Registries
    • ORCA Collections Register
    • ORCA Project / Expert Register

 

Background

During 2007, APSR is funding partners to act as members of a national support network for online research collections. This is a human and social network that aims to provide an element of connectedness for stakeholders:

• eResearchers
• eResearch technologists (data scientists and domain-specific informatics specialists).
• Collection managers
  

 

ORCA at the University of Sydney

University of Sydney involvement is coordinated by Rowan Brownlee in consultation with a local ORCA Reference Group. Rowan works with the local group to identify and undertake activities relating to the APSR ORCA project.

 

ORCA areas of activity

The ORCA Support Network has four areas of activity:

• Communications Forums
• Training
• Registries
  • ORCA collections registry
  • ORCA e-research expertise register
• Consulting

 

Communications forums

The Support Network will establish, foster, and maintain communications forums to increase the connectedness of the stakeholder groups. These might be wikis, blogs, mailing lists, and RSS feeds. One example is the IR Net mailing list for Institutional Repository Managers. Other possible groups that may benefit from such forums include e-research technologists (such as visualisation experts), data-centre managers, discipline based research teams, library collection managers, and eresearch support staff.

Training

Workshops may include digitisation for academics, metadata for fieldworkers, xml for repository developers, application training, and digital preservation for collection managers. Members of the support network will analyse the needs of their stakeholders groups. Preference will be given to training that targets researchers and research technologists.

Registries

The ORCA Collections Registry is an APSR project which is tightly coupled with the ORCA support network. Each network partner will work with local and regional collection managers to register research collections.

The ORCA project register will be a register of partner projects and expertise. It will not be exhaustive and will be based on existing or planned registers at partner sites*. ORCA will investigate ways of aggregating these registers.


*For an example of a projects and skills register in development at the University of Sydney Library, see Prototype project descriptions database and discovery service. The page includes an overview of the project, visual data model and examples of live reports generated from the implemented database.