Legacy Data Collections

The Challenge

Australia holds a wealth of research data within national collections established under the Australian Government’s 2009-2010 Research Data Storage Infrastructure program. However it’s difficult for researchers to find and reuse these high-quality collections.

The Response

This project focuses on supporting existing data collections of national significance and helping the researchers who collected them receive recognition for their research outputs.

We’ve established co-investment partnerships with organisations managing these research data collections. Our partners are enriching their collections to a more FAIR state using 13 controlled, international metadata elements and the international data citation initiative DataCite.

Who Will Benefit

Researchers will be acknowledged and cited when their collections are reused in research.

Infrastructure providers will deliver more efficient infrastructure operations to support their researchers and institutions.

The Partners

We’re working with organisations managing existing research data collections that were established under the Australian Government’s 2009-2010 Research Data Storage Infrastructure program.

Our co-investment partners are:

• National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)
• Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
• University of Melbourne
• QCIF
• Intersect
• Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) at the University of Tasmania
• Monash University

Target Outcomes

Significant national data collections will be described in a consistent and persistent manner using the international citation framework, DataCite. This allows researchers to easily and accurately locate their data collections in a digital research infrastructure and acknowledge other researchers’ data collections when they’re reused.

This project will establish the foundation for a coherent national definition of an important data collection to rapidly identify data collections of national significance.

Infrastructure providers will more deeply and accurately understand the nature of the data collections their storage contains and use this business intelligence for operational efficiency gains.