Acceptance Criteria

Principles:

• ANDS requires a Project Plan early in the project, in order to finalise project scope, choice of software and to confirm appropriate resourcing and planning;
• If a project is embarking on metadata stores without existing infrastructure, then ANDS will not require delivery of the complete metadata store, nor all the deliverables depending on it - until the end of the project.
• If a project is embarking on metadata stores with existing infrastructure, then ANDS expects that there will be a feed of records supplied to RDA (see Deliverable #1) by the middle of the project.
• Remaining mandated deliverables are likely to have multiple dependencies on other software and organisation units, so ANDS will not require delivery until the end of the project.
• ANDS encourages project to schedule deliverables earlier than agreed in the project description where possible.
• Because there is likely to be a lengthy period between the Project Plan and other deliverables, ANDS requires regular and frequent progress reporting - every three months. Reporting will be lightweight, just a couple of pages, but ANDS needs to monitor progress closely, given that these are infrastructure projects with a large number of dependencies.
• For consistency, ANDS is maintaining a ratio of payments across all projects of 25% each payment period.

Table of acceptance criteria for each Deliverable

D1	A working feed of records describing Collections and associated Activities, Parties and Services to Research Data Australia, in the current version of RIF-CS (1.3+), demonstrated to meet the quality requirements for RIF-CS records as set by ANDS. Acceptance: If the project is using an existing technology* then this feed is expected around the middle of the project. The feed will be confirmed by an inspection (by CLO*) of a sample of nominated records in Research Data Australia. If the technology is bespoke then an expected date should be included in the Project Plan. *Existing technology means that there is already a working Metadata Store. *CLO = Client Liaison Officer (ANDS.
D2	A feed of collections from at least three distinct Faculties (or equivalent organisational units) within the institution to Research Data Australia. Acceptance: This spread across Faculties is intended to support an institution-wide approach. The feed can be automated or manual. The three, or more, Faculties (or equivalent) will be confirmed by an inspection (by CLO) of a sample of nominated records in Research Data Australia. An expected date should be included in the Project Plan.
D3	Demonstrated alignment of metadata records about Parties with an institutional name authority (HR or Library), with the authoritative form of the name sourced external to the metadata store, and with new researcher descriptions added to the metadata through regular updates from the name authority. Acceptance: This interface between one or more nominated sources of party record details and the Metadata Store is expected to be confirmed by a statement of achievement by Project Manager. Specifically, this will be demonstrated by an alignment of metadata records about parties with an institutional name authority (HR or Library), with the authoritative form of the name sourced external to the metadata store as well as new researcher descriptions added to the metadata through regular update from the name authority be confirmed by written statement by project partner. An expected date should be included in the Project Plan.
D4	Demonstrated alignment of metadata records about Parties with the ARDC Party Infrastructure Project, with researcher descriptions contributed to the NLA, and with People Australia identifiers for researchers recorded against researchers. Acceptance: Alignment with the NLA Party Infrastructure will be demonstrated by an inspection (by CLO) of examples of records using NLA Identifiers in Research Data Australia, as nominated by Project Manager. An expected date should be included in the Project Plan. ANDS recommends that Metadata Stores projects aim to: include NLA Party Identifiers for the ARC/NMHRC grant investigations that have been started after 1st January 2009 and that you create and maintain NLA identifiers for the researchers whose research data is already published in Research Data Australia (RDA) (…for those wanting to extend the reach of their projects) include Party Identifiers for grant recipients for the last 10 years. This extended coverage will enable institutions to develop a richer research portfolio based on award history.
D5	Demonstrated alignment of metadata records about Activities with institutional and external sources of truth (Research Office, ARC and NHMRC grant registries), with the authoritative description of the Activity sourced external to the metadata store, and with new researcher project added to the metadata through regular updates from the sources of truth. Notes. At the time that the Metadata Stores Program was initiated, it was anticipated that ANDS would be able to facilitate the development of a service from ARC and NMHRC that would provide an automated content feed to Activity records. ANDS coverage of ARC/NMHRC Grant Activities is currently 2000-2010 (records for 2011 are in progress). These records were intended to act as place holders until the automated service was in place. Regrettably, the development of such a service is taking longer than we had anticipated. In fact, such a service is unlikely to exist before the Metadata Stores Program finishes. Consequently, we need to be fairly pragmatic about this deliverable. This means that you should continue to acquire those records via RDA and that it will be ANDS that aligns the Activity records relating to ARC or NHMRC grants with 'sources of truth' (for now). However, we would hope that you would have the ability to enhance your Activity records by updating them to include more accurate and current project descriptions that reflect the evolution of what a project aims to achieve and how it is being conducted. Regarding grants that are not from either ARC or NHMRC, the same principles apply: we expect you to create rich records locally and provide them for harvest by RDA as Activity records. Acceptance: Integration with the ANDS records derived from the Grants Registries will be demonstrated by inspection (by CLO) of nominated examples of Activity records. An expected date should be included in the Project Plan.
D6	Demonstrated workflow for registering new Collections in the university; this can include automated update, or semi-automated (notification-based). Acceptance: This deliverable will be demonstrated by a document description (with schematic) of the workflow that includes some form of alert or notification that a new collection has been, is being, or is about to be, created. An expected date should be included in the Project Plan.
D7	A software system to realise deliverables D1–D6 (and D8, D13–D14 if applicable), with robust storage and management of metadata. Acceptance: ANDS does not intend to formally assess software code already assessed or approved e.g. ReDBox, VIVO. A detailed diagram(s) (schematic) of the architecture of the metadata store with associated use-case(s) will be used to assess the deployment by the ANDS Technical Assessment Group and will be shared with ANDS partners (note - please insure that these diagrams are licensed as CC BY). In order to make these useful and accessible to others, ANDS is currently proposing several options: involving different forms of a short report or presentation to the Community. Example: A system for extracting and updating common organisational metadata into a central authoritative source [PDF 880KB]. This is an excellent example of a description of the methods and technologies developed by CSIRO for their Metadata Stores project.
D8 - D13	Optional Deliverables Optional Deliverables for Metadata Stores are likely to be developed in response to local circumstances, constraints and needs. For this reason, it would be counter productive for ANDS to be highly prescriptive about how these deliverables should be interpreted. Instead, ANDS encourages Partners to arrive at measures of success that will ensure the deliverables meet their overall objectives especially where they align with those of ANDS. For example, D9 (public researcher portal) at one institution might draw on the richer aspects of its research data collection schema to include descriptions and rights metadata while another might choose to simply feed the names of relevant data collections to its researcher portal. The overall objective, in both cases, being that the public portal has the capacity to draw from aspects of the institution's research data metadata. Acceptance: ANDS expects each institution to choose at least one optional deliverable. Progress regarding chosen optional Deliverables is expected to be included in the ANDS Progress Report Template.