Further work
As Monash tests the use of the data curation continuum and the curation boundary
ideas, it will accumulate a body of knowledge about how best to make the decision to
move data or objects across the boundaries. Part of the migration process over
boundaries will need to focus on the object metadata, which will need to be modified
and augmented at each transition. In a research repository, the descriptive metadata
will be assumed, or encoded within the object name or its directory. In a
collaboration repository, it will be the minimum needed for location and management
within a collaboration context. In a public repository, the metadata will need to be
quality-controlled and significantly augmented so as to improve exposure and
accessibility. New metadata, such as PREMIS (preservation) metadata to assist with
long-term curation, will also have to be added in a publication/preservation context.
Another part of the migration process shown in Figure 1 is the assignment of a
persistent identifier (such as a handle) to the object to facilitate persistent access.
The current approach is to only assign a handle once the object is in the
publication/preservation repository. An alternative approach is to assign the handle
to every object in the research repository and then just update the handle as the
object is migrated (Sefton, 2007). This approach facilitates the migration of
publications that are linked to data objects prior to publication. As researchers
become more comfortable with the new repository-based collaboration
environments, it may be worth considering moving to this approach, although this
has to be offset against the associated ongoing handle management overhead.