Research questions and hypotheses

The project will investigate the following questions, testing the relevant hypotheses:

1. Ethnographic research methodologies often include subjects re-visiting collected data to see how it prompts even richer stories. It is an hypothesis of this research that identified cultural resources can act as rich triggers for cultural expression, often by people other than those who first identified them. This entails a valuing of stories and interpretations by others who may have more comprehensive or possibly, different stories to tell about the same resource.
2. To what extent does the process of cataloguing resources make the conversion from cultural knowledge to cultural capital more tractable and what are the best ways to do this? The hypothesis is that an appropriate in-the-box solution will enable the development of distributed and privately owned catalogues, leading to better understanding and trust. In turn, this will lead to more, higher-quality, aggregated catalogues that can combine public resources with discovery services for the future. The model for this is the web where experience suggests that participation builds familiarity and trust.
3. It is asserted that Qualified DC is better than DC because it allows for richer, deeper structured description of resources. Matchbox will be evaluated as a ‘second-generation’, QDC system. Matchbox records will be downward compatible and interoperable with standards-compliant DC records of existing subject gateways, libraries and other Australian (and international) collections. The value added by these enhancements will be investigated.
4. Matchbox will not contain resources but rather the information that is necessary to discover and retrieve resources. It is an hypothesis that multimedia descriptions may, in some situations, be more valued than textual ones, especially for retrieval. How the multimedia descriptions should be related to the resources and records of them (either as part of the record or automatically associated with it) is a related research question.
5. The modestly-priced availability of Matchbox will enable many organisations to create and share standards-compliant records of their resources or resources of interest to them. This project will test a new version of distributed professional development, implemented by Liddy Nevile in 1995-6. A peer support group will be created by accompanying the distribution of the software by the development of a web of users, supported by Motile.