Member Spotlight: Malcolm Wolski, member of the Organisational Advisory Board (OAB)

Malcolm Wolski is the Director, eResearch Services, Information Services at Griffith University, Australia, where he is a member of the senior leadership team which provides library, information management and IT services.  In this role (since 2007), he is responsible for the development, management and delivery of eResearch services to the University’s research community, which includes the associated information management systems, applications, infrastructure, high performance computing, data management services as well as a small media production service. This is executed through an integrated platform of services and infrastructure within the Division of Information Services and involves working closely with library and IT infrastructure services staff from other units as well as partnering with a number of external organisations involved in research activities.

Malcolm has a work background in IT, library, strategic planning, and operations research and has qualifications in business, IT and environmental planning.

In the context of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), Malcolm is the organisational representative of the Division of Information Services, Griffith University, which became an organisational member of RDA in late 2013. Since March 2016, he has also been a member of the RDA’s Organisational Advisory Board (OAB).

As part of an investigation into what the purpose, functions and solution for the next research data repository system might look like for Griffith University, Malcolm recently undertook a review of the current outputs and recommendations of the various RDA working groups to date, as well as possible work-in-progress activities. A summary of the findings is listed here.  In Malcolm’s view, a good number of the working groups have recommendations of interest, e.g. Basic Vocabulary of Foundational Terminology and the Machine Actionable Templates, both especially relevant to new repository development. Malcolm plans to take many of these recommendations on board during development of a new system for Griffith University.