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IR and National Impetus

 

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Question (Beryl Anderson, ESR Ltd):

Moving on from that question and from where Chuck [Henry] left off, a question around what leadership is required for institutional repositories, how do we get the impetus in New Zealand where our government structure is quite different from both Australia and the United States?

Follow up (Steve Knight, National Library of New Zealand):

Can I suggest that is maybe not just a question for the panel but a question for the floor. Not only responding to Chuck [Henry]’s comment but also Penny [Carnaby]’s call this morning that we are about to go into the budget process for the 2006–07 year, and whether or not there is a national or sectoral, or some kind of activity, that could be recommended from today that could be brought forward to that process. Maybe that could be open to the whole floor. Some people are starting to leave now and it would be good to get as much comment on that as possible prior to everyone breaking up this afternoon if that’s okay John [Rankin]?

Follow up (Derek LeDayn, Library Consortium of New Zealand):

I have a variation to that question, it’s not an answer. I guess one of the questions I’ve been mulling over is, given New Zealand’s specific circumstances right now, institutions are starting to take on building institutional repositories, so we have the opportunity of learning from Australia, from US, from everywhere else on the planet.

The question I’ve been wondering about is what is it that would provide best value for New Zealand by being done collaboratively, collectively or by some institution on behalf of us all as distinct from those things best done by each institution for itself?

Follow up (Brian Flaherty, The University of Auckland):

As part of our working group and one of the strategies that we did talk about was the role of a national resource discovery layer over the top of all the individual institutional repositories so that they are not just silos but there is a national research framework.

Steve [Knight], do you want to comment on that from the National Library’s perspective? The question was for Steve [Knight] anyway.

Follow up (Steve Knight, National Library of New Zealand):

The National Library probably has, at this stage, two activities that it needs to pursue as part of the repository process. The first is around what might be called the independent or non-aligned researcher. The Library is looking at what it’s going to do in order to support that particular community. The second is the provision of … resource discovery across whatever repository structure actually gets implemented, and it’s something the libraries committee is doing on behalf of … the repository community in the next year or two.

But I think what I was really trying to get at was is there something that can be done now to pull together whether at the university level, the polytechs, the CRIs, in a way that we can do something that aggregates the requirements of all those sectors in the short term through the current budget round?

Response:

KB — Part of me would say it’s just a case of roll your sleeves up, take off your shoes, wade in, get it done, and that obviously means doing it, going it alone, and learning all your lessons and making all your mistakes. Sometimes what happens as a result of that you become the leader because you’ve made all the mistakes and people come to you for advice and what lessons have been learned. There’s a great deal to be gained from dealing with the government and the requirements that they might have for information about what your activities are, so I think that encourages you to make contact with the government and keep in close contact with your political leaders as well as the library leaders.

CHR — That’s obviously important but it’s the community of experience that leads the process. So the fact that we’ve been invited to talk is because we’re doing this, rolling our sleeves up and having a go at it. Most of us are doing it because our government has funded us to have a look at the ways that we can build repository solutions that will be of general benefit.

So we are looking at standards in … and those are discussions you need to have together so that you get New Zealand standards and a New Zealand agreed way forward. We had those discussions within Australia as well so, an example of that is that Katie [Blake] is leading a working group of people from about eight different institutions in Australia looking at the vocabulary for XACML because we think if we have an Australian solution it will aid … and accessibility into the future. So instead of Arrow devising a solution we’re doing that as a whole of nation approach.

You do actually need to be there doing something in order to be able to have those discussions around those standards and those solutions and that kind of thing. The RQF and your PBRF are also very good platforms. If there’s a requirement or expectation that you will start to provide documentary evidence through a repository in digital format then it’s actually easier to do that jointly than to try and do a whole lot of disparate solutions, and when I talked earlier about work with Research Master, our dialogue is actually with DEST, our dialogue is actually with the government to see what they need out of the RQF.

There are things that you can do jointly, but at the policy level I’d go back to what I said before about lobbying to make sure that funding bodies have a requirement for a data management plan that can only be driven at a national level, it can’t be driven, it could be driven at an institutional level but it would be less effective.

Follow up (Keith Webster, Victoria University of Wellington):

Summing up: I’d offer some thoughts perhaps sum up some of the questions, give Steve [Knight] something to take back to Penny [Carnaby].

Really, in terms of national collaboration, one of the things we need to think about, and it will be the decision of each institution, is the extent to which we need something customised either at the institutional level or at the national level or whether we want a product … or digital … or something else that we simply take off the shelf, plug in and let it tick over.

To what extent do we want to be developers, and play underneath the bonnet, to use Cathrine [Harboe-Ree]’s term earlier on? If the answer to that is we do want to play and customise, and tweak and enhance and so on, then perhaps there is some sense in looking to share expertise, a national team who might be able to go around institutions sharing that expertise.

I was struck by some of the comments during the day about the scarcity of skills and exposure to risk. If there is a national pooled resource to share in terms of people who can get under the bonnet, that might be quite an attractive proposition. Possibly in some institutions the notion of shared space on servers might be attractive. Some institutions will have terabytes of data posted locally, some institutions … larger than a gigabyte will be at that level of magnitude and perhaps shared server space might be a factor.

Clearly standards metadata, schema and so on are things that, at the very least, need a degree of national discussion and debate, if not national implementation.

I was struck by the expert working group who went around Australia and every institution we visited, by and large, was using the Australian research classification as a thesaurus for arranging subject headings. I don’t know if there is a New Zealand equivalent, if not maybe we lift the Australian one and change the name, but maybe we get to change what’s inside the packet as well.

I’m conscious that from the universities that the majority of us are using Research Master and clearly there needs to be a degree of dialogue, probably best … between the universities, Research Master and the Tertiary Education Commission around alignment of metadata requirements, submission formats and so on. It’s something that we’re not going to solve for the next interim … but by 2012 hopefully we’ll have some of the answers.

I guess the question which Penny [Carnaby] posed this morning is should government departments at this stage be budgeting next year for some sort of funding to allow interested parties to be given a repository? That was kind of what Penny [Carnaby] was saying in a circuitous way.

But do we want government to be giving us funding to put repositories in place? That’s the key question which I think we need some feedback on this afternoon.

Follow up (Graham McGregor, University of Otago):

What I’ve heard today is an opportunity, lots of opportunities, and then Chuck [Henry] I heard you, and my chin went down, my head went down, no, listen to what he’s actually saying, he’s not saying deny the opportunity, he is saying realistically there is a nettle to be grasped, and I think for the National Library that is the message that I hear from this group of people, that we have an opportunity and a nettle to be grasped.

When we put stuff in these repositories wherever they are, it provides a mechanism whereby a group of people, whatever the object is, whatever the data is, who have the courage to say something. Out there is another group of people who presumably have some kind of willingness to listen to what that data is and to respond to it in some kind of …

The indication from the New Zealand government increasingly has been that there is a partnership and a relationship between the tertiary sector and the business community in New Zealand.

How is that conversation going to happen? I put it to you that that conversation can happen through the kind of data that is put up in these repositories.

I don’t think from everything that I’ve heard today you’re going to stop it, it’s happening. It happened in the same way with the Internet. We put the information out there, we let communities listen to the information and make use of it in whatever way they want, but at the end of the day what happens if we don’t do it? Who else will do it?

In four days the wee repository that we’ve put up has had hits from eight countries in the world.

New Zealand claims that it wants to be part of a global community, here’s a mechanism for doing that, and it means we don’t have to have the footsteps in the country left behind because we’ve got the technology and we’ve got the ideas to do that.

Thank you.

Follow up (Beryl Anderson, ESR Ltd):

As the person who started off the conversation, there’s a couple of things that I want to raise that haven’t been touched on directly here.

There’s a lot of people here and we’ve sort of come basically from universities and research organisations, … and IT people, but out there in the big bad world there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on that actually affects institutional repositories. From my role in the CRI I’m currently employed in I know, for example, that MORST are having discussions around what to do with the datasets that researchers get together before they do their research, and they’re looking at having some form of means of accessing those datasets once the research has been completed. They are actually funded for the ongoing maintenance of that dataset once the researchers have finished, and that is part of what could become an institutional repository. That discussion is already going on.

There’s been a lot of talk today and the last two days about all the sorts of cooperation that’s going on in the development and discussion of standards and all those sorts of things, but where does someone like me who doesn’t have a lot of internal resource find out about what’s going on? Where’s the leadership providing … like the Australians have got that I’ve heard about now that I’m going to actually put … quite frequently?

Who is responsible for actually informing the wider New Zealand community of what is available, what is going on, how you get involved?

Where is the policy developer? Who is going it?

Why has up until very recently all this stuff that’s been done in government been concentrating on the core government agencies and not being fed out wider?

And I can say that because I was employed by a core government agency and I worked on some of those e-government developments but we didn’t go beyond spreading it wider than that and now we’re talking wider than core government and what is the government policy and how do we influence it on getting the funding into those agencies that aren’t core government but still need funding?

Follow up (Graham McGregor, University of Otago): Well said.

Follow up (Beryl Anderson, ESR Ltd):

So I guess Steve [Knight], that’s the message you need to take to Penny [Carnaby]. She needs to be doing that actual active core government brokering and ensuring that different agencies, MORST, FORST, … funds, Tertiary Education Commission, all those sorts of agencies, need to be actively talking policy development, policy interaction, and interaction between research and the community, whatever that community is, and how the funding and how the relationships are developed and brokered.

Follow up (Ingrid Mason, National Library of New Zealand):

Who’s the lead agency in Australia, talking about leadership or agencies? I can’t remember which one of you it was had put their hand up for a whole lot of the APSR projects that all got funding. National Library of Australia is hugely implicated in that process but there must be other lead agencies in Australia?

Response:

CHR — The lead agency is really DEST, Department of Education Science and Training, which funds higher education, and research agencies like … and so on.

They have taken the lead and articulated through the research information infrastructure programme which is about to be replaced by something called National Collaborative Research Information and there’s an S and I can’t remember what it stands for.

AB — I think it’s Scheme.

CHR — Scheme, thank you. So NCRIS we call it, and that picks up and says why the government would be involved in coordinating activities and requiring standards and trying to break down silo activities. They’ve identified priority areas of research that they will fund, and part of that scheme, part of the framework for it, is actually research information again and infrastructure which is the kind of stuff that we have been funded under in the past.

So they’ve very much taken the lead on that, and sitting under the NCRIS umbrella is the e-research coordinating committee which will pick up a lot of this kind of activity as well, and that’s where the requirement for data management plans funding will come from, well the push for will come from here, it isn’t mandated but that’s where the push will come from.

The National Library [of Australia] has a valuable role to play, and that’s why it’s involved in the four original research information infrastructure programmes. They have a mass of technical expertise around preservation and federating, which are the two main reasons that they have come into the project, I don’t think I’d say that they play a leadership role except in a technical way although I would like to see them pick up some of the advocacy role that’s just been articulated so well here in the forum.

Follow up (Ingrid Mason, National Library of New Zealand):

… Also the agency driving force for the physical infrastructure too?

Response:

CHR — Yes the AU might talk about their role in funding APAC and things like that.

AB — Certainly a lot of the national infrastructure was funded as part of the … and that paid for a lot of the technology backbone, and to some extent some of the dataset and some of the research works as well. In terms of other aspects of the infrastructure it was to a certain extent a challenge thrown out to universities to actually respond with theories, proposals, different projects that come along. Some of the work that was done at AU would be one of those projects.

AS — It’s worth perhaps also mentioning that DEST is responsible for the university funding teaching as well, whole universities come under that, but the one area that probably doesn’t come under, I guess it’s another lead agency maybe, it is telecommunications which doesn’t come under DEST.

CHR — That comes under DCITA which is the Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts and the … research coordinating committee is a joint ministerial committee that reports to the DCITA and DEST ministers, so the government’s starting to try to improve coordination at the top level as well.

But we suffer the same problems that Chuck [Henry] has talked about in the United States, there is a lot of silo activity going on, there’s no central information strategies defined by government and so we had a National Office of Information Economy but it didn’t come into this area at all and was highly constrained in terms of funding so probably was very selective about which parts …

Follow up and Question (John Garraway, President of LIANZA):

We’ve heard a lot today about where should the leadership come from, there’s a group called RATTLE which I know is just really a forum for research and tertiary libraries to come together, and they were supposed to be meeting this year but the meeting got cancelled. But I suppose the real key to that is that that’s actually where this whole sector could get together and engage in this, and there is a communication that comes out from them where every institution actually contributes to that, and maybe this should be one of the strong themes.

The other point is that a lot of us are also involved in various either regional alliances or sector based alliances but not necessarily national either, and maybe we should be thinking about how to leverage off some of those types of activities too. The important thing is communication about what everyone is up to, because otherwise we will cross over, we will waste energy and potential opportunities … central government.

Just a comment to the panel, we’ve heard a lot about the university perspective, … Australia, I would like to know about the polytech equivalent in Australia and where are they fitting in to this, because that’s a question for us here in New Zealand I suppose is where do we fit in to some of the work that is going on in the universities?

Response:

CHR — The TAFE sector is the Australian equivalent of the polytechs. They are very advanced in managing learning objects but not necessarily through repositories. They have very advanced metadata schemas, and have a high level of agreement on standards and so on.

We have some institutions, our RMIT in Swinburn for example which actually manage both a university and a TAFE, and Swinburn is part of our project, and they’re not actually putting TAFE material into their repository at this stage, they are actually more at the research end of it.

So, a lot is happening in the TAFE sector which you would probably find of interest but I don’t think there are any examples of a merged repository at this stage.

JS — In Australia the TAFE sector is an example of a sector who work by states in Australia and works quite well internally within states but don’t communicate very well between states. And our experience with that is we can work with NSW and we can work with Victoria but to get NSW and Victoria working together at the moment is still a challenge.

AS — The thing there is that the TAFE sector reports to the states, the universities report to the commonwealth. Slightly different gloss on that, there are probably some institutions in Australia which we call universities which you might call a polytechnic, there’s a bit of blurry bit in there, we don’t use that terminology. And there are also some institutions which teach at a tertiary level which aren’t recognised by the government as universities but they’re not TAFE either, e.g. the Australian Maritime College which conducts training courses for marine engineers and captains and so on.

So the situation it’s hard to put an exact equivalent in there.

CHR — Can I pick that one up again? It’s quite intriguing really. On this expert coordinating committee I was asked — no other sector was asked — what is the role of librarians? Which I thought was fascinating really, but when I tried to unpack why I was being asked that, the feeling is that in a policy and funding environment librarians have often come to the table with their hands out rather than their minds forward, and it’s a prejudice we at least have in Australia. I don’t know whether you have it in New Zealand or not.

I was asked to write a paper outlining the role of librarians in this brave new world, which I have done, and we have also through … established a working group on e-research, again picking this stuff up so it’s absolutely relevant.

And we have done the nucleus of a strategic plan for trying to advance, there’s many of us, to be able to play a leadership role in managing e-research outputs and so on and so forth, and this will lead into bids to government for funding to employ training coordinators, to do audits of courses and short courses and so on, and possibly to set up institutes to fast track our bright younger staff to be able to manage repositories and all that that entails.

I see it as an opportunity but also do see it as Chuck [Henry] has outlined, at the moment it’s a void actually, there are a few examples of people doing things but the space is there to be claimed or lost. I think that as a profession, and I don’t just mean the library, I actually mean information management professionals, working with our IT colleagues and so on, we have to claim that space or it will become less relevant to our institutions and see opportunities that weren’t available 5–10 years ago going begging.

Everyone in this room, if we talk about what New Zealanders do nationally, it doesn’t just rely on Penny Carnaby or the National Library [of New Zealand], it won’t happen with one person who can put forward the case, it won’t happen with two people who’ve got … skills or whatever. It’s actually a much bigger professional issue than that, what are our schools teaching, how do we fast track their skills and we can identify their skills their advocacy, so we’re talking about technical skills but also advocacy skills and policy development skills. Can we step forward and can we stop senior people in Australia saying to the library representative what is the role of librarians? There are some meaty things for us all to think about.

AS — The only professional society I know that’s really got involved is the Australian Computer Society. We have also had involvement from our academies, Science, Technology, Technological Sciences, even the Academy of Humanities for example organised a workshop just about a month ago which I attended on these roles.

So the academies are playing a professional society role as well. So there are resources, you just have to mobilise them and start asking them, what do you think about this. Engage them into the activity if you think they’re appropriate.

Follow up:

(John Garraway, President of LIANZA)

This time in response to a question over there, I think our role is to advocate and we’ve been doing that. This would fit into a continuing PD programme for members, and people outside the membership. I think that’s the thing to remember about the Association is that it’s working for its members, it does have that broader advocacy role as well, but at the same time it also has to deliver value to the people who actually belong to the Association and value the Association and the vital role it plays in that advocacy.

I think LIANZA has been positioning itself very much for individuals, for the future, there’s a question around institutions and what it can really do for institutions, because I think it’s the institutions themselves that will drive a lot of this.

We can support the institutions by providing programmes to enable people to upskill and become competent in these areas but at the same time I think it’s about the institutions themselves getting together to work out a plan for moving forward.

Question (Ingrid Mason, National Library of New Zealand):

… National Office of Information seemed to go near this and why it didn’t go there, was that a matter of professionals not launching with their minds or was it purely economic?

Response:

CHR — The National Office of Information and Economy is a peculiar creature that came out of a policy wish of the Australian Government that wasn’t properly resourced. It had a very broad charter, it was supposed to look at the Internet capability of the nation, and given that there was no governance structure under it, it had to work … with little money, I think it’s not surprising that this has been … on its horizon and it was really concentrating on trying to raise awareness within the big government departments on their information and whether they were making it available.

It has morphed into another creature called AGIMO, Australian Government Information Management Office, I think, which is part of the Department of Treasury and Finance, and it’s generally felt it might have more clout sitting in there than it had when it sat outside. It’s interesting because … went to … , sorry about that, to lobby for issues around open access and so on, and they did understand it, they were interested, but the onus was on us I suppose to give a strategic way forward.

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