TReDDS: Metadata Stores at the University of Tasmania - 20th March 2013
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Hurn, Jon
Lynn, Davies
Presentation by Jon Hurn and Lynn about Tasmanian Research eData Directory Service (TreDDS).
 Hopefully you can see that slide okay there. Yes, it's really not about any particular technical discussion or challenges that we have faced. It's also aimed at those who are not aimed at those who are already publishing or close to publishing because you've already overcome lots of the challenges that we would have faced. It's really just an encouragement for those of you who are facing project challenges and some tips on how you can maximise your project's value. Hopefully it's not too much of a big jam presentation and keep telling us we're doing well but sometimes it's hard to assess when you're actually doing it yourself. Time frame for our project was nine months. It started in September last year and it's scheduled to finish in May this year. The team, I'll just introduce my team here. We've got Lynn Davies. Lynn's a data manager. She's got a strong university background. Lynn, do you want to say hello? Hello everyone. My background is librarianship. I've worked on and offered you tests as a librarian since the late 80s in a range of positions. I was brought in as the person who had the bibliographic background and the liaison role between the librarians and also the researchers. On my right here is Suli, Suli's technical officer. Suli joined in November. She's been working on this project for three months. She's a bit of a worker. She's really good in technically and she's also got a good background in repository. I'm working in the library since 2011 as a library assistant officer. Definitely, there's all about my experience in the library. It's actually really useful having a technical officer who has an understanding of library systems already. That was helpful for us in the project. As Simon's already mentioned, there will be four project managers in the project in the first four months. That's really not the project about a bit. The reason for those four project managers are quite varied. The first one was in the process of seeking work elsewhere while he was in the process of writing up the initial project plan. I guess his half was in the unit. We then had a project manager who got stuck into it for a month. Unfortunately, there was a restructure at work and she was taken off and put on different projects. Her manager took on and because of that restructure within a month, his position was mainly redundant as well. At that point, he was jumping up and down so we've got to get this fixed. I was brought in to try and get the project back on track. I joined in the week before Christmas, which is not a good week to be handing over your existing projects or to take on new stuff. When you come back in the new year, you've pretty much forgotten everything that would be told you about the new project in the starting. Effectively, we were starting from scratch as of the start of this year. We did have a project plan, but it was unfinished. We had no sustainability plan, which is a key deliverable plan. We had no breakdown schedule either. The guys today who had been working on the project had just tackled each issue one by one without any key viewers to what they were aiming for, what they were trying to get to at the end of the project. It isn't very reactive. We reacted to problems without having any sort of proactive plan. At the point we came on board at the end of December, start of January, our Phase 2 deliverables were also due as well. Our budget had effectively been spent. We were four months into a project after our initial funding had been given. I guess you can see it was a bit of a challenge. The other thing was as a project manager, I was located in a completely different area of the campus. That was going to be challenging as well. From that respect, as you can see, the challenges were there. On the positive side, we've got a good team. I think we're all hardworking, at least with who we are. We're all trustworthy, and that's not just trustworthy. I'll get the violin to somebody to give you back. It's more trustworthy in delegation of tasks. If I say to them, I'll leave this done or I'll go to Sue and I'll say, can you solve that technical problem? They go away and they solve it, and if they've got problems, they come back and they talk a bit. We understand each other, what our capabilities are. We're accountable and responsible for what we do. That is a really positive thing for the team as well. We've had an excellent ASEAN officer who's been very responsive to our needs. We can highly recommend him. His knowledge about the project and what we're trying to do is second to none in our experience. If he doesn't know, particularly if he knows somebody who knows. He says, you need to go and talk to JC. They have had that problem that they can help you in that aspect. Or you need to go and talk to UniSA. They're doing things in a way that you're doing things they can help you in that aspect. That's again, proved invaluable for us. Team Red Box is QCIF. Duncan and Andrew have been fantastic help as well. They're really responsive to Google groups. They've worked through the Google groups. They've obviously got a very high workload in terms of trying to do with a number of different customers they're trying to support. QCIF is their preferred methodology. Use those guys, they're fantastic. Also, the great user community. As I mentioned, there is, as you need to talk to Sarah, you can talk to this university or that university. It's so useful to have other people who have gone through problems or are experiencing the same problems. If you're sharing your issues with them, you put two heads of better than one in effect. Having that knowledge available to us in Newtas has been really good. You guys, you know who you are. I won't mention names, but... Yes, we have a lot of thank yous. There's about four or five universities who we've been leading on and they've been comfortable. My recommendation to anybody who's still feeling their way is what I did when I was going through that process with changing project managers is I literally sent emails to a couple of people that I've seen or met through these webinars. And they were fantastic. I had phone calls from people where they just went through problems over the phone. We had Skype communication and I had one where the librarian organised the technical person and another library person to come along and the three of them spent an hour on the phone just talking to me about different issues. So we'd love to reciprocate if anybody has any questions from Newtas. I've found that the communication... Ben, can I interrupt for a moment? Yes. Could you...people having a lot of trouble hearing you because of the best straight effect, can you just move as close to the mic as possible? Can you hear me now? Yes. Yeah, that's better. Did you want me to repeat that? All I wanted to say was that during the period when I was effectively on my own, apart from having Louisa Danes, I often sent an email to people that I'd met through these webinars asking questions and I've had fantastic feedback. A lot of them Skype to me or organised phone calls and just rang me out of the blue to assist. And so if there's anybody that is still feeling their way, I'd like to suggest that more than happy if we can assist. Well, I found the user community, within nationally, everybody's going through the same problems and we're all at a range of stages. And so you can feel quite panicky and isolated and I think that's been a fantastic support, not only Ann's but also other librarians or other technical managers or project managers that are going experiencing the same thing. So that's just a what I want to comment on. Okay. Other strategies? Other strategies are co-location. So if you're four months into a five months project and you feel like you're standing in a scratch, you've really got to get a communication going. Co-location does that. So we're basically working out the same building now. And for the first two or three weeks I was actually sitting next to Sue, getting my head into the red box space, the min space. It's the only way you're going to break down those barriers to communication is to work in the same area. The communication becomes more organic. You get quicker fixing of missed communications. You get cross-pollination of ideas when you're working together at the same place. You can, somebody else is having a phone call, you can hook into that. You understand what you're saying, that problem you're having now and perhaps you can solve it in another way. We have formal once a week meetings where we document everything we do. Just so that we keep that record going and we can refer back to issues as well. And being co-located also builds your team. I think you build up interpersonal relationships and that again is invaluable when you're under pressure, when you're under stress and you need to try and solve problems. Everything we do goes on the wiki. So we use that as the end confluence for information sharing outside the project. Which is also forward-looking as well. So at some point the team will be disbanded as a project and we'll go into operational mode. At least everything we've discovered is available to the new team as they take operational control of the product. It also makes things more discoverable and accessible, which is pretty much like a repository anyway. This is the thing, it's over there. Communication, I didn't sort of refer to this already. Work here as an officer, work weekly, work your product support team, talk to your business stakeholders and talk to your business users as well. So that's probably a good segue to hand over to what you've been doing as a metadata manager. Can you hear me okay Simon? Yeah that's good. Keep up the volume and closeness to the mic. Where's the microphone? Just talk to the speakers. Just call it out if you can't hear and I'll try and go slowly. I've built all my slides so pretty much everything I'm going to say hopefully will be on the slide. My aim was to, my number one aim was to try and develop positive relationships which could be built on after the project. So that included everyone from researchers, data managers, the research office and even librarians within the library. So that was my number one aim to field any negativity and to just start shifting the culture. John probably didn't mention because we're in a short time frame here but UTAS came on board with this nine month project that has been compressed basically to six months without having done any earlier ANS projects. So there is a big cultural shift that we have to, we didn't do a set in the commons or data capture. So because of the limited time my approach was to look at quality, quality in everything I did over quantity in terms of how I approached the libraries and the librarians, who I saw as researchers and the number of published records. So I'm just going to touch on the three main areas which is the library, the researchers and the published records. You'll have to do it quickly, Lyn. You'll have to be relatively quick because this is your first wind-up call. It's now 10.16. Okay. From the library we have about 16 liaison librarians. So I actually rather than doing one PowerPoint, I did individual to small group upskill sessions and then I did refreshers. So I decided to work at the cold face and work with them like that and I found that worked really well. Then to all the library I did internal newsletters so everybody knew what was happening once a quarter and I attended as many library meetings as I could. So in terms of researchers, my data interview approach was to look for champions and also we received a spreadsheet that had all current and completed grants which included beyond ARC and NHMRC. So the liaison librarians could choose who they want to go and see. We also met, as John pointed out, we met with research office, the RDSI infrastructure staff and all data managers to inform them about the project and also learn. And then we also visited the Antarctic Division because I've got a world's best practice data centre just to be inspired about where we want to go for in the future. And then finally the aim for published records was the liaison librarians are going to try and go out and do data interviews with all the schools and centres that they represent to get sort of a sample record. And we're also looking at trying to get two imports from two different subject areas to just try and get people thinking about automatic imports as well as manual records. Okay, thanks Lynn. I'll skip Sue because she's a bit nervous and we're short of time so we'll just go on to some other project value ads. You okay with that Sue? Yeah, yes. She's very happy. For us, Institute of Marine and Aquatic Sciences, they've come on board and are very keen to start using our service. They've got some huge data sets and once we get one of our big customers like IMAS on board and that encourages the other institutes and schools to get on board as well. I know Men's Institute have got some large data sets which we're keen to get into the red box system and also the central science laboratory have got a lot of stuff as well. Hooks into RDSI, research data, storage infrastructure. And this has really come through from IMAS as well. They're big users or they're going to be big users of RDSI so they're very keen to get links in that respect. There's a couple of visions they've got there in terms of researchers depositing data and our project getting an automatic note that the data is there and perhaps there needs to be some description of that data going up to RDSI. One of the key things that we're trying to get going with this project is strategic renewal. Senior management become aware of the trends and some ideas and how this project can be used to further research support initiatives. The library in fact has now started talking with our research office. They're saying, hey, there's some things happening out there. We're getting a little bit behind. Our current infrastructure is looking a bit stale. Let's use this particular project as a springboard onto something bigger. Let's get some serious governance in place with the IKL services, the library. So that's a key thing we're going to take out of this project. Just summing up the four key points there. Don't just focus on the details or the deliverables. Look for some big pictures left to value out and raise your project profile. Ask lots of questions as per them. Get out there, talk to people. It's far easier to get things from somebody else than to work it out for yourself sometimes. Document and communicate and finally get up from your desk and go and talk to someone because it's basically people do projects, not project plans. And that's done. Hopefully we managed to get that all done in your time. So I'll hand back to you, Simon.
 Hopefully you can see that slide okay there.  Yes, it's really not about any particular technical discussion or challenges that we  have faced.  It's also aimed at those who are not aimed at those who are already publishing or close  to publishing because you've already overcome lots of the challenges that we would have  faced.  It's really just an encouragement for those of you who are facing project challenges  and some tips on how you can maximise your project's value.  Hopefully it's not too much of a big jam presentation and keep telling us we're doing  well but sometimes it's hard to assess when you're actually doing it yourself.  Time frame for our project was nine months.  It started in September last year and it's scheduled to finish in May this year.  The team, I'll just introduce my team here.  We've got Lynn Davies.  Lynn's a data manager.  She's got a strong university background.  Lynn, do you want to say hello?  Hello everyone.  My background is librarianship.  I've worked on and offered you tests as a librarian since the late 80s in a range of positions.  I was brought in as the person who had the bibliographic background and the liaison role between the librarians  and also the researchers.  On my right here is Suli, Suli's technical officer.  Suli joined in November.  She's been working on this project for three months.  She's a bit of a worker.  She's really good in technically and she's also got a good background in repository.  I'm working in the library since 2011 as a library assistant officer.  Definitely, there's all about my experience in the library.  It's actually really useful having a technical officer who has an understanding of library systems already.  That was helpful for us in the project.  As Simon's already mentioned, there will be four project managers in the project in the first four months.  That's really not the project about a bit.  The reason for those four project managers are quite varied.  The first one was in the process of seeking work elsewhere while he was in the process of writing up the initial project plan.  I guess his half was in the unit.  We then had a project manager who got stuck into it for a month.  Unfortunately, there was a restructure at work and she was taken off and put on different projects.  Her manager took on and because of that restructure within a month, his position was mainly redundant as well.  At that point, he was jumping up and down so we've got to get this fixed.  I was brought in to try and get the project back on track.  I joined in the week before Christmas, which is not a good week to be handing over your existing projects or to take on new stuff.  When you come back in the new year, you've pretty much forgotten everything that would be told you about the new project in the starting.  Effectively, we were starting from scratch as of the start of this year.  We did have a project plan, but it was unfinished.  We had no sustainability plan, which is a key deliverable plan.  We had no breakdown schedule either.  The guys today who had been working on the project had just tackled each issue one by one without any key viewers to what they were aiming for, what they were trying to get to at the end of the project.  It isn't very reactive.  We reacted to problems without having any sort of proactive plan.  At the point we came on board at the end of December, start of January, our Phase 2 deliverables were also due as well.  Our budget had effectively been spent.  We were four months into a project after our initial funding had been given.  I guess you can see it was a bit of a challenge.  The other thing was as a project manager, I was located in a completely different area of the campus.  That was going to be challenging as well.  From that respect, as you can see, the challenges were there.  On the positive side, we've got a good team.  I think we're all hardworking, at least with who we are.  We're all trustworthy, and that's not just trustworthy.  I'll get the violin to somebody to give you back.  It's more trustworthy in delegation of tasks.  If I say to them, I'll leave this done or I'll go to Sue and I'll say, can you solve that technical problem?  They go away and they solve it, and if they've got problems, they come back and they talk a bit.  We understand each other, what our capabilities are.  We're accountable and responsible for what we do.  That is a really positive thing for the team as well.  We've had an excellent ASEAN officer who's been very responsive to our needs.  We can highly recommend him.  His knowledge about the project and what we're trying to do is second to none in our experience.  If he doesn't know, particularly if he knows somebody who knows.  He says, you need to go and talk to JC.  They have had that problem that they can help you in that aspect.  Or you need to go and talk to UniSA.  They're doing things in a way that you're doing things they can help you in that aspect.  That's again, proved invaluable for us.  Team Red Box is QCIF.  Duncan and Andrew have been fantastic help as well.  They're really responsive to Google groups.  They've worked through the Google groups.  They've obviously got a very high workload in terms of trying to do with a number of different customers they're trying to support.  QCIF is their preferred methodology.  Use those guys, they're fantastic.  Also, the great user community.  As I mentioned, there is, as you need to talk to Sarah, you can talk to this university or that university.  It's so useful to have other people who have gone through problems or are experiencing the same problems.  If you're sharing your issues with them, you put two heads of better than one in effect.  Having that knowledge available to us in Newtas has been really good.  You guys, you know who you are.  I won't mention names, but...  Yes, we have a lot of thank yous.  There's about four or five universities who we've been leading on and they've been comfortable.  My recommendation to anybody who's still feeling their way is what I did when I was going through that process with changing project managers  is I literally sent emails to a couple of people that I've seen or met through these webinars.  And they were fantastic. I had phone calls from people where they just went through problems over the phone.  We had Skype communication and I had one where the librarian organised the technical person  and another library person to come along and the three of them spent an hour on the phone just talking to me about different issues.  So we'd love to reciprocate if anybody has any questions from Newtas.  I've found that the communication... Ben, can I interrupt for a moment?  Yes.  Could you...people having a lot of trouble hearing you because of the best straight effect,  can you just move as close to the mic as possible?  Can you hear me now?  Yes.  Yeah, that's better.  Did you want me to repeat that? All I wanted to say was that during the period when I was effectively on my own,  apart from having Louisa Danes, I often sent an email to people that I'd met through these webinars asking questions  and I've had fantastic feedback. A lot of them Skype to me or organised phone calls and just rang me out of the blue to assist.  And so if there's anybody that is still feeling their way, I'd like to suggest that more than happy if we can assist.  Well, I found the user community, within nationally, everybody's going through the same problems and we're all at a range of stages.  And so you can feel quite panicky and isolated and I think that's been a fantastic support, not only Ann's but also other librarians  or other technical managers or project managers that are going experiencing the same thing.  So that's just a what I want to comment on.  Okay. Other strategies? Other strategies are co-location.  So if you're four months into a five months project and you feel like you're standing in a scratch, you've really got to get a communication going.  Co-location does that. So we're basically working out the same building now.  And for the first two or three weeks I was actually sitting next to Sue, getting my head into the red box space, the min space.  It's the only way you're going to break down those barriers to communication is to work in the same area.  The communication becomes more organic. You get quicker fixing of missed communications.  You get cross-pollination of ideas when you're working together at the same place.  You can, somebody else is having a phone call, you can hook into that.  You understand what you're saying, that problem you're having now and perhaps you can solve it in another way.  We have formal once a week meetings where we document everything we do.  Just so that we keep that record going and we can refer back to issues as well.  And being co-located also builds your team.  I think you build up interpersonal relationships and that again is invaluable when you're under pressure,  when you're under stress and you need to try and solve problems.  Everything we do goes on the wiki. So we use that as the end confluence for information sharing outside the project.  Which is also forward-looking as well.  So at some point the team will be disbanded as a project and we'll go into operational mode.  At least everything we've discovered is available to the new team as they take operational control of the product.  It also makes things more discoverable and accessible, which is pretty much like a repository anyway.  This is the thing, it's over there.  Communication, I didn't sort of refer to this already.  Work here as an officer, work weekly, work your product support team, talk to your business stakeholders and talk to your business users as well.  So that's probably a good segue to hand over to what you've been doing as a metadata manager.  Can you hear me okay Simon?  Yeah that's good. Keep up the volume and closeness to the mic.  Where's the microphone?  Just talk to the speakers.  Just call it out if you can't hear and I'll try and go slowly.  I've built all my slides so pretty much everything I'm going to say hopefully will be on the slide.  My aim was to, my number one aim was to try and develop positive relationships which could be built on after the project.  So that included everyone from researchers, data managers, the research office and even librarians within the library.  So that was my number one aim to field any negativity and to just start shifting the culture.  John probably didn't mention because we're in a short time frame here but UTAS came on board with this nine month project that has been compressed basically to six months without having done any earlier ANS projects.  So there is a big cultural shift that we have to, we didn't do a set in the commons or data capture.  So because of the limited time my approach was to look at quality, quality in everything I did over quantity in terms of how I approached the libraries and the librarians,  who I saw as researchers and the number of published records.  So I'm just going to touch on the three main areas which is the library, the researchers and the published records.  You'll have to do it quickly, Lyn. You'll have to be relatively quick because this is your first wind-up call. It's now 10.16.  Okay. From the library we have about 16 liaison librarians. So I actually rather than doing one PowerPoint, I did individual to small group upskill sessions and then I did refreshers.  So I decided to work at the cold face and work with them like that and I found that worked really well. Then to all the library I did internal newsletters so everybody knew what was happening once a quarter and I attended as many library meetings as I could.  So in terms of researchers, my data interview approach was to look for champions and also we received a spreadsheet that had all current and completed grants which included beyond ARC and NHMRC.  So the liaison librarians could choose who they want to go and see. We also met, as John pointed out, we met with research office, the RDSI infrastructure staff and all data managers to inform them about the project and also learn.  And then we also visited the Antarctic Division because I've got a world's best practice data centre just to be inspired about where we want to go for in the future.  And then finally the aim for published records was the liaison librarians are going to try and go out and do data interviews with all the schools and centres that they represent to get sort of a sample record.  And we're also looking at trying to get two imports from two different subject areas to just try and get people thinking about automatic imports as well as manual records.  Okay, thanks Lynn. I'll skip Sue because she's a bit nervous and we're short of time so we'll just go on to some other project value ads.  You okay with that Sue?  Yeah, yes.  She's very happy.  For us, Institute of Marine and Aquatic Sciences, they've come on board and are very keen to start using our service. They've got some huge data sets and once we get one of our big customers like IMAS on board and that encourages the other institutes and schools to get on board as well.  I know Men's Institute have got some large data sets which we're keen to get into the red box system and also the central science laboratory have got a lot of stuff as well.  Hooks into RDSI, research data, storage infrastructure.  And this has really come through from IMAS as well. They're big users or they're going to be big users of RDSI so they're very keen to get links in that respect.  There's a couple of visions they've got there in terms of researchers depositing data and our project getting an automatic note that the data is there and perhaps there needs to be some description of that data going up to RDSI.  One of the key things that we're trying to get going with this project is strategic renewal.  Senior management become aware of the trends and some ideas and how this project can be used to further research support initiatives.  The library in fact has now started talking with our research office. They're saying, hey, there's some things happening out there. We're getting a little bit behind.  Our current infrastructure is looking a bit stale. Let's use this particular project as a springboard onto something bigger.  Let's get some serious governance in place with the IKL services, the library.  So that's a key thing we're going to take out of this project. Just summing up the four key points there.  Don't just focus on the details or the deliverables. Look for some big pictures left to value out and raise your project profile.  Ask lots of questions as per them. Get out there, talk to people. It's far easier to get things from somebody else than to work it out for yourself sometimes.  Document and communicate and finally get up from your desk and go and talk to someone because it's basically people do projects, not project plans.  And that's done. Hopefully we managed to get that all done in your time.  So I'll hand back to you, Simon.
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