McCrabb I1, Lynch M
1Systemik Solutions, , Australia
Biography:
Dr Ian McCrabb is the founder and managing director of Systemik (systemiksolutions.com), a Sydney based IT consulting group focused on open-source digital humanities platforms and research sites. His 2021 PhD dissertation 'Buddha Bodies and the Benefits of Relic Establishment: Insights from a Digital Framework for the Analysis of Formulaic Sequences in Gāndhārī Relic Inscriptions' focussed on methodologies for the analysis of donative inscriptions and characterization of the ritual practices and religious significance of relic establishment in Gandhāra.
Mike Lynch is a software engineer and team lead at the Sydney Informatics Hub with fifteen years’ experience providing specialised research IT support, with expertise in research data management, open standards for data repositories and the application of modern IT development and deployment practices to research software.
Abstract:
This presentation reports on the transition of the ARDC Curated Collections for Enduring HASS and Indigenous Data project from conceptual pilot to reusable platform infrastructure. Earlier eResearch Australasia presentations (Lynch and McCrabb) characterised many digital humanities projects as “relationship graphing”: the semantic annotation and linking of heterogeneous content, producing structured data and a public research presence. They also identified the sustainability problem: important research collections are still often trapped in legacy, bespoke or under-supported systems.
The presentation describes the standing up of the Curated Collections Omeka S Version 1 distribution and the migration of approximately a dozen projects from Heurist and WordPress. The distribution packages Omeka S with selected modules, themes, vocabularies, taxonomies, resource templates and installation/update processes, providing a repeatable foundation for collection publishing.
The scope is practical implementation. We examine how Heurist relational structures were mapped into Omeka S resources, item sets, media, templates and controlled vocabularies; how WordPress sites were analysed to separate collection data from presentation logic; and how migration decisions were documented where legacy structures were inconsistent, underspecified or shaped by earlier software constraints. We outline the deployment strategy: containerised application instances on Nectar, provisioned with Terraform and integrated with federated login for authentication and access control.
The conclusion is that sustainable migration is not content transfer. It requires disciplined modelling, provenance, researcher review, rights and attribution, URL strategy, presentation requirements and maintainability. Version 1 marks a shift from bespoke recovery to managed, reusable research infrastructure, preserving past investment while supporting future HASS and Indigenous collection development.
