Curated Collections for Enduring HASS and Indigenous Data

The Challenge

A common requirement for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) research is the ability to make digital research collections available online. This is often a requirement of national grant funding but is also consistent with making the outputs of research open, accessible and reusable. This has led to a proliferation of bespoke websites in a variety of commercial and open source platforms (such as WordPress), which require specialist skills, are generally not cyber-secure and which are sustained on fragile infrastructure.  

Current solutions are frequently short-lived due to high maintenance demands and a lot of effort and money is wasted reinventing digital infrastructure for hosting collections. 

A better approach for HASS online research collections would be to address the HASS researcher-specific metadata and functionality requirements in a standard web publishing platform solution for these researchers. Unfortunately, a high number of important collections are currently hosted on legacy platforms that are end-of-life. This makes it difficult for HASS and Indigenous researchers to process, publish and share enduring collections of research consistent with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles.

The Response

This project’s aims are: 

1. Deliver a platform for enduring HASS collections, using established digital humanities software, which enables researchers to build and maintain collections without specialised technical support.
2. Allow users to easily publish archives and collections of digital content using the platform, which will be easily searchable, accessible and reusable (FAIR principles).
3. Develop a training and support model which will provide documentation and hands-on workshops to help researchers get started with the new platform.
4. Enable existing formats of archived data to be easily imported so that existing collections can be migrated to the new platform. 
5. Allow export of collections in a standard format from the platform to enable archiving and reuse.
6. Validate the solution by migrating a sample of key collections to the platform as part of the project and to provide ‘seed content’. 
7. Document the implementation of the platform and make it available as a codebase and container that other Australian institutions could easily reproduce should they wish to do so.
8. Develop a sustainability model by which collections are maintained as active projects while funded and for a set period after project completion, and then migrated to a low-dependency, archival format that is still accessible to non-technical users.

The archival method proposed here would enable published collections to be preserved in long term archives such as PARADISEC or the Australian Data Archive, where appropriate, helping to mitigate the lack of long-term data storage solutions in the HASS and Indigenous research sector.

This project is part of the ARDC Community Data Lab.

Selected platform: Omeka-S

Omeka-S is a well-established, open-source, humanities-dedicated web publishing platform for institutions interested in connecting digital cultural heritage collections with other resources online. Since 2016, the Omeka project has been a fully independent entity, under the fiscal stewardship of Digital Scholar, a not-for-profit company dedicated to sustaining critical open-source infrastructure for the digital humanities. 

The funding and support for Omeka-S includes the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Library of Congress, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Getty Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. The platform has been used sporadically by Australian institutions, including the University of Queensland, for the preservation of HASS and Indigenous collection websites. 

An Omeka-S implementation would support most common types of media natively (including text, images, audio, video, basic maps etc) and may be extended to support linked storage of bespoke types (e.g. 3D-models, blueprints, point clouds etc). The basic Omeka-S web interface is user friendly and can be administered with relatively little technical support and the platform is extensible through the use of plug-in “themes” and “modules”. 

The ability for researchers to build and maintain HASS digital research collections consistent with FAIR principles without specialised technical support is a potentially valuable capability in a range of HASS and Indigenous RDC projects. More broadly, the Curated Collections project will provide an enabling capability to support the publishing of project outputs consistent with FAIR principles, which is a requirement for ARDC co-investment projects.

The new platform will run on the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud to ensure accessibility and sustainability for Australian research.

Who Will Benefit

• Australian HASS researchers who need to create a website to publish their data and document their workflows and/or tools (e.g. as an output of a project). For example:
  • History: Transforming the East – Jesuit Translations of Chinese Classics
  • Literary Studies: Archipelagic Connections in Australian and Pacific Literature
  • Ethnomusicology: studies collecting video and audio recordings documenting musical resilience within marginal groups in culturally diverse societies.
  • Archaeology projects requiring GIS data at different resolutions and multimodal digital assets such as LIDAR point-clouds, drone imagery and 3D models of artefacts and sites
• People who support researchers in their use of digital research infrastructure (including research infrastructure providers and digital skills trainers)
• Communities of research participants
• The wider academic community will benefit from being able to find, browse and reuse these collections in research, policy or education. 

The Partners

• Sydney Informatics Hub (SIH) at the University of Sydney (lead)
• ARDC
• Systemik Solutions

Target Outcomes

1. Preservation of high-value HASS and Indigenous collections by migrating from existing legacy infrastructure
2. A sustainable template for publication of HASS and Indigenous research collections
3. A reduction in the number of costly, bespoke collections websites
4. Increased availability and discoverability (see FAIR principles) of existing collections 
5. Training materials and documentation

Key Resources

• Project plan – Curated Collections
• Response to public feedback on draft project plan – Curated Collections