Thorny Staples
Director, Office of Research Information
Smithsonian Institution
The Office of Research Information Services (ORIS) was created, within the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), to address the need to manage the digital output of all of the research activities of the institution. ORIS has built a first pilot system of SIdora, a general information architecture and software environment based on Islandora and Fedora that is designed to be used by Smithsonian researchers to capture and organize the digital “evidence” as they create it in their research process, and use it directly in their analysis and dissemination activities. The goal is to actively support the research process as it unfolds, leaving behind a coherent expression of the digital content for a complete research project that can permanently stand alongside related publications. The SIdora architecture, which is designed to manage research output as if it were part of a network of information, will be presented and the first version of the software will be demonstrated for managing the excavation evidence of a complete archaeological site in Panama, and for an international study of mammal populations. The demonstration will show how the system enables researchers to manage and describe their own data, use it with Taverna workflows for analysis, and to expose sets of durable resources to be cited in publications.
