Contributing to Project Bamboo


The Link Affiliates Team within ADFI at USQ has been working with the University of Melbourne's e-Scholarship Research Centre (eSRC) to document and contribute material relating to the Australian Women's Archive Project to Project Bamboo. Project Bamboo, being funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, is a wide-ranging initiative to improve humanities research through the development and sharing of digital technologies.

Using the Australian Women's Archive Project as an example, the Link Affiliates Team is demonstrating a method of analysing e-Research infrastructure requirements to determine generic functionality, challenging the perception that every discipline and institution's requirements are unique. The need to capture common infrastructure requirements across disciplines and meet them with reusable services is recognised by both Project Bamboo and the e-Framework. The team has combined the two approaches with a novel modelling technique to facilitate the combining of discrete blocks of functionality.

This approach could be used to build a high level services infrastructure model for building and sharing e-Research collections in Australia.

The analysis for this activity is derived from the real example of the Australian Women's Archive Project, a joint project between the National Foundation for Australian Women and the University of Melbourne. It focuses on the AWAP's principal repository, the Australian Women's Register, using the Online Heritage Resource Manager.

Stage 1 - Contributing to Bamboo

Link Affiliates Team members collaborated with staff from the AWAP project at the eSRC. They participated in Bamboo working groups, attended two Project Bamboo workshops and submitted artefacts into the Bamboo process:

  • a "scholarly narrative" was developed that describes in narrative form the Australian Women's Register and its context. The purpose of the scholarly narrative in Bamboo is to "express particular aspects of scholarship, scholarly workflow, research, and/or teaching with an initial emphasis on those that are or could be facilitated by technology"
  • Two "recipes" describing the processes of the AWAP were then developed. In Bamboo, recipes "describe how to achieve goals using information technology. Recipes are written for scholars and describe the tools and steps needed to complete a task in non-technical language". The two recipes for the Australian Women's Register are:
  • "Activities" that could be re-used in other recipes. Activities are typically the parts of a task that can be facilitated by a single Tool. Activities are not the scholarly ends, but steps to real scholarly ends. They might be reusable so that that someone could "cook up their own Recipe using Activities or just use some of the Activities". Some of the activity descriptions contributed by this project to Bamboo are:

Bamboo aims to use these artefacts and analysis to motivate development of Bamboo services and to develop a "Services Atlas" that allows discovery of services and tools by researchers. The development of services and the Service Atlas is the subject of a second phase Bamboo funding plan.

Stage 2 - Factoring out common infrastructure using the e-Framework

Using e-Framework methods, the Link Affiliates Team developed a services infrastructure view of the Australian Women's Register. The result was a high level Collaborative Biographical Encyclopedia Service Usage Model (SUM). The high level SUM was built using smaller component SUMs representing discrete blocks of generic functionality, such as content syndication or annotation. The smaller component SUMs deliberately describe systems that are independent of discipline and technology. These component SUMs describe represent common infrastructure that could support multiple discplines.

To facilitate this combination of components the team has extended the e-Framework using a novel notation based on UML component diagrams. The notation, and its implications for e-research systems design, were presented at the e-Research Australasia 2009 conference (source presentation, annotated version)

The outputs of Stage 2 are:

Stage 3 - Sharing and Extending the Strategy

The techniques used in Stage 2 of the project could have broad application in the Australian e-research sector and beyond. A workshop was held in August 2009 at the e-Scholarship Research Centre to share the outcomes of the Bamboo collaboration, and explore high level strategies for building and sharing e-research collections.

The high level strategy proposes an approach to documenting the generic services infrastructure for building and sharing e-research collections, supporting the following business processes

  • Discovery, through the Searchable Collection SUM
  • Sharing, through the Syndication/Harvest Service Genre
  • Online content creation, through a modified version of the Collaborative Biographical Encyclopedia SUM
  • Review, through the Moderation SUM
  • Annotation, through the Annotation SUM

More Information:

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