Making Australian research available internationally
Fieldwork - use for elicitation and documentation, and for language learning in preparation for fieldwork
Return of materials to communities
Digital tools for optimal transcription and analysis
Comparative studies - historical recordings give time depth for area language and music studies
Better understanding of diversity - data from some languages only in older recordings
Incorporation of primary data in presentations and, ultimately, publications
Staged approach
Metadata - 1623 records, to make resources discoverable even if not yet digitised
PIs and content metadata need to be assigned before digitisation (some refinement during process)
Repository - 807 items digitised to date, some complex e.g. fieldnotes (page images) or transcripts accompanying tapes
Metadata November 2004
1623 records in the metadata repository with data from 24 countries in Asia-Pacific (Australia, Chile, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Lao, Malaysia, Federated States of Micronesia, Myanmar (Burma), New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Reunion, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Taiwan, Tonga, Vanuatu, Vietnam)
Rapa Nui - Museo antropologico P. Sebastian Englert
Micronesia - Historical Preservation Office, Yap
Audio Ingest
Initially ingested as raw WAV on AudioCube 5 Dell 670 workstations running Wavelab (2005 will add remote Pyramix workstations)
Masters 24-bit 96khz Broadcast WAV Format (uncompressed audio with encapsulated metadata)
Some lower rate if digital original (e.g. 16bit 48khz from DAT)
WAV > BWF by Quadriga software
derivatives produced by batch processing - CD-audio quality (16-bit, 44.1khz) and mp3 quality(128bps)
Digital preservation
“Azoulay” server partitioned for working files and archive partition for sealed masters - current capacity 750GB (>3TB in 2005)
Sealed masters archived to 100GB data tapes on University of Sydney LTO Mass Data Storage System (high-low watermark script) - duplicate data tapes kept at 2 locations on campus
Sealed masters mirrored to APAC national Store facility (Canberra) nightly - nearline storage
Main campuses (University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, Australian National University) connected by Grangenet (next generation research network, 10Gbps connections)
Pay subscription, not traffic costs
Satellite campus UNE connected by AARnet (Australian research and education network - currently billed traffic cost, 155Mbps connection)
Both with connections to APAN community (Asia Pacific Advanced Networks) - potential for linking to regional and international R&E networks - potential traffic costs an issue
Storage
Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing National Facility Mass Data Storage System - Hierarchical Storage Manager system
Sustainability of our collections - how to cost overheads and source long-term funding commitments
DELAMAN governance and administration structures? How to resource and support without duplication/reinventing the wheel, adding to administrative burden?
How to involve all stakeholders (including local/national bodies of originating communities)?
APAN Bangkok 2005
E-science workshop: Toward a semantic web for digital data archives (convenor V. Balaji, Princeton)
Immense quantities of digital data and images are now archived and publicly available through the web. These include domain-specific data archives, covering such domains as weather and climate, seismology and geophysics, astronomy and particle physics, as well as images and digital copies of non-textual human cultural production. Describing, cataloguing, searching and locating information within digital data and image archives is one of the grand technological challenges of the semantic web era. This session will draw together participants from diverse fields of science and the humanities to share their experience on metadata, standards and techniques for access to large digital archives.
Tentative Titles of presentations:
1) The Hierarchical Data Format for EOS (HDF-EOS), Richard Ullman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Invited)
2) Metadata Requirements for Global Climate Models, V. Balaji, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
