Library Intelligencer

Defining and describing collections for the Australian Research Data Commons

This half day workshop will be held in association with VALA 2010 in Melbourne on Friday 12 February 2010.

Background: The notion of defining and describing data collections for Research Data Australia is a new and challenging one. Developing Research Data Australia is one aspect of the task of creating an Australia Research Data Commons, designed to enable data sharing and re-use of valuable research data collections.

ANDS is building Research Data Australia as a set of interlinked, user-friendly web pages to display this rich descriptive information (metadata), harvested from a range of trusted online sources and held in a federation of online registries.

This workshop is designed to introduce the concepts and practices behind defining and identifying research data collections. It will include an introduction to permanent identifiers (PIDs) and digital object identifiers (DOIs). It will also cover collection description using the RIF-CS standard, based on ISO 2146, in use in Research Data Australia.

Who should come: This workshop is designed for all of those who work in research institutions and who have responsibility for defining and describing collections for harvesting into Research Data Australia. The workshop will be limited to 40 people.