Welcome

Welcome to the the AANRO repository evaluation blog.

AANRO stands for Australian Agriculture and Natural Resources Online.

The University of Southern Queensland has been contracted by Land and Water Australia to undertake an evaluation front-end software to the Fedora repository back-end. This project blog will be written by some of the project staff, who also work on the RUBRIC project. This project is not part of RUBRIC.

I'm Peter Sefton, and I'll be taking a high level strategic view of the process. Tim McCallum and Bron Dye and Caroline Drury will also contribute posts about the evaluation process.

Here's a cut-n-paste from a recent job ad that explains some of the context:

Land & Water Australia is a Statutory Corporation established under the Primary Industries and Energy Research and Development Act of 1989. Its primary focus is to organise and fund research and development (R&D) activities with a view to improving the long term productive capacity, sustainable use, management and conservation of Australia's land, water and vegetation resources.

While its key role is to organise and fund research, the Corporation also has a major objective to ensure that the knowledge base is applied to improve management practices and natural resource management policy. Land & Water Australia objectives, in keeping with its mission and charter, are outlined in its five year Research and Development Plan.

The AANRO research database of information for agriculture and natural resource management is jointly funded by some 30 participating research organisations through the Primary Industries Standing Committee (PISC), the Natural Resource Management Standing Committee (NRMSC) and the Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDC's).

AANRO is currently being redeveloped from a bibliographic database running on an Inmagic IT platform into a full text subject digital repository of research material in the agriculture and natural resource management area. The new AANRO will be running on open source software similar that used in the ARROW and RUBRIC projects. For further information on the existing AANRO database see http://www.aanro.net (please note the database is currently in a state of suspension until the end of July 2007).

To keep track of these posts you can subscribe to this blog using a feed reader, but you may also like to check out the del.icio.us bookmarking system where we'll use the tag aanrorepos to tag items of interest to the project.

This project is unusually open. The agreement is that we will blog as we go, and the final report will be available under a creative commons license, open access. We've been going for a couple of weeks now, so there's a backlog of stuff to report.

Copyright 2007 The University of Southern Queensland

Content license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.