Overview

Development of a software tool to support field researchers to implement international standards in data creation and description in order to facilitate a sustainable workflow for creating Submission Information Packages under the OAIS model.

Latest version

Schedule

2006 -

Alpha prototype launched Dec 2006

Beta version 2nd quarter 2007

Main participants

Requirements specification

Linda Barwick, Tom Honeyman
PARADISEC, University of Sydney

Ian Johnson, Steven Hayes, Andrew Wilson
Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney

Design and implementation

Ian Johnson, Steven Hayes, Kim Jackson
Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney

Tom Honeyman
PARADISEC, University of Sydney

Partners

PARADISEC
ARC Linkage: National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia
ARC Linkage: Angkor
EthoER - EResearch project for ethnographic media
Bidwern - EResearch project
Murrinhpatha song (ARC Discovery)
HCSNet - Human Communication Science Research Network
Barwick Grangenet project ‘Sustainability of distributed and federated datasets in the humanities'
Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ARC Discovery)
PNG linguistics (ARC Discovery)
NE Arnhem Land (Corn, Langton, Galiwin'ku Knowledge Centre)

Description

Fieldworkers typically collect data in an ad-hoc way during fieldwork, leading to patchy and highly variable metadata quality at the time of submission to a digital repository. It can be very difficult or even impossible to reconstruct some of this information at a later date, yet these resources are often unique and unrepeatable records of highly significant events collected at considerable expense of researcher time, effort and resources. From the repository perspective, lack of metadata (including preservation metadata) can have serious implications not only for ingestion into a repository, but also for subsequent archival management and dissemination of archival information. This project aims to extend the scope of the OAIS model to facilitate sustainable data collection and description of digital objects from the time of creation during fieldwork, and to integrate this workflow with repository ingestion, management, and dissemination requirements.

The objectives of the FieldHelper project are to develop and field test a cross-platform Java software tool that will allow fieldworkers to record relevant preservation, description and structural metadata about their resources and their inter-relationships at the time of data creation in the field, and from this to output METS documents to accompany submission of their digital data to relevant repositories. This will be based on APSR-approved standards (e.g. METS and OAIS), and interface with the University of Sydney testbed repositories (PARADISEC, Archimage and Usyd D-Space), but should also be applicable to other APSR projects and repositories.