Copying a practice I've seen other bloggers do - and as an attempt to kickstart this one, and also remind myself that giving this domain a bit of an overhaul is something I want to do this year - I'm going to set aside a bit of time every Friday afternoon to record what I worked on this week.
My work's in a state of flux and will be for the next couple of months as my manager left and my team - which covered what in Australia and New Zealand is called 'eResearch', technical and policy support for the actual doing of research - has become part of the wider IT Research team which also supports systems like ResearchMaster and Symplectic, which are more about research administration, keeping track of grants, projects, impact and outputs.
I'm going to be doing more work in the domain architecture area, and also taking on more of the engagement with researchers around data management. It's exciting, and the higher levels of actually talking to people are making me feel like I'm coming out of a kind of sedation induced by working from home. I'm back in the office two days a week, which makes a huge difference to how connected I feel.
About half of the week felt like it was handover of research data management documents and engagements. There were a few meetings around the architecture side - all of the research admin systems need to have integrations to University systems and also the parts of our eResearch infrastructure to do with data management.
I also spent a bit of time preparing for a series of sessions our team and the Library are running in May as part of the launch of RESHub - a physical space for providing resources and advice to resarchers, which was meant to open in 2020.
Technical work - which is something I think I'll be doing less of this year - involved debugging the latest version of Oni, our linked-data / ocfl / web application platform, on one of its applications, an internal library of successful grant applications. A lot of this involved figuring out why Solr, the search engine componenent, kept blowing up or soaking up all of the memory Docker could give it.
Oni uses RO-Crates as its metadata format. This morning I joined the RO-Crate Community Call - most of the people are in Europe but they've kindly put every second meeting in their evening so it's 7AM Sydney time. I'm planning on doing some sort of demo of Oni's ability to turn RO-Crates into an indexable JSON file for the next meeting.