This is the home of Federating Access to AusStage - Flinders University Goals and ObjectivesAusStage is the Australian hub for research on live performance, linking researchers in universities, industry and government. It meets the national need for public access to reliable information on live performance in Australia. A large-scale collaborative project, AusStage brings together information science and the performing arts, generating new synergies for the creative industries and the knowledge base to better understand the benefits of government investment in the arts. With 44% of the Australian population attending performing arts events every year (as many as attend sporting events), live performance is crucial to community cultural development. It is also a key mechanism for generating and renewing the national culture. Performance events attract major transnational capital to Australia and promote the strengths of Australian society to international audiences. The AusStage project represents a ten-year collaboration between Australian scholars at eighteen universities and partners in government, industry and the collections sector. At its core is the AusStage database of the Australian performing arts, which is now the central repository for the nation’s accumulated knowledge about live performance. Infrastructure investment from the ARC and university partners has created an elegant, open access information resource, accessible to all researchers wherever they work at http://www.ausstage.edu.au, as well as a network of research teams spanning the country. The database now holds records on over 48,000 performance events, 79,000 artists, 8,800 organisations, 5,800 venues and 41,000 archival items. It records and maps the extensive, densely interconnected network of creative collaborations between the people, places, organisations, practices and responses that converge around live performance events. The goal of this proposal is to significantly advance researcher involvement in the collaborative curation of the AusStage dataset. The project outcome will be an increase in the number of researchers actively contributing data to AusStage and an increase in the number of records entered, edited and updated. The key deliverable is to provide researchers with federated access to the ‘back end’ administration and editorial areas of AusStage. AusStage specific usernames and passwords have proven to be a significant barrier to participation in data curation activities. Integrating with the AAF will make authentication easier. We anticipate that this will lead to increased participation rates in data curation, particularly amongst the AusStage CIs. ScopeThe scope of this project is the design and installation of software to provide researchers with federated access to the ‘back end’ administration and editorial areas of AusStage. The current user base with ‘back end’ access is 60 researchers and trained cataloguers distributed around Australia. During this project AusStage will target its twenty-eight university-based Chief Investigators, and their research assistants and postgraduate students, to adopt AAF-enabled access to the AusStage back-end. We anticipate a 50% increase in the number of users with back-end access. The core objective, however, is to increase user activity, measured by an expected 100% increase in the rate at which records are entered, edited and updated by the end of the project. Mini-grant Project Team Contacts
Mini-grant Activity ReportsActivity Report - September 2010 Activity Report - October 2010 Activity Report - November 2010 Activity Report - February 2011 Activity Report - March 2011 Activity Report - April 2011 Activity Report - May 2011 Activity Report - August 2011 |
AusStage (Flinders) |
