Museum Metadata Exchange is an excellent discovery tool for researchers wishing to explore Australian museums and institutional collections. It offers descriptions and links to a wide range of collections throughout Australia.

A snapshot of the different collections you can discover in this valuable search tool:

National - The Australian National Maritime Museum including, Australian Indigenous burial rituals or 19th century immigrant journals and songs.

Australian Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) data discovery portal is now LAUNCHED. TERN's mission is "to link the science and scientists both within and across disciplines" through a data portal which will collect, store and distribute important data.

Major datasets from Australian scientists are discoverable in this portal, they include:

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR) is a research data repository helping accelerate scientific discovery in autism research.

NDAR provides the infrastructure to store, search across, and analyse various types of data. In addition, NDAR provides longitudinal storage of a research participant's information generated by one or more research studies.

Tropical Data Hub is a specialist data repository for tropical dataset.

The repository is organised within specific research fields including:

• State of the tropics.
• People and societies in the tropics.
• Industries and economies in the tropics.
• Tropical health, medicine and biosecurity.
• Tropical ecosystems, conservation and climate change.

For further information search the map and find the data.

Dryad is an international data repository in the basic and applied biosciences. The goal of the repository is to preserve all the underlying data reported in a paper at the time of publications. Recognising the emerging trend of data citation, this is an excellent example of a repository supporting the management of data and sharing. See the November 2011 blog on Dryad for further information.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Data Repository contains research datasets sourced from NCEAS funded activities. NCEAS, a cross-disciplinary and collaborative institute, has made the repository publicly available through the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) - a network designed to facilitate ecological and environmental research.

tDAR - the Digital Archaeological Record - is an international digital archive and repository. It houses data about archaeological investigations, research, resources and scholarship, to provide broad access to a wide range of archaeological data.

The Data Hub describes itself as "the easy way to get, use and share data".

The Data Hub is a community driven catalogue of datasets on the Internet. It uses open-source data cataloguing software CKAN, which provides each dataset record with fields for descriptions, formats, ownership, access and subject areas, among others.

Most of the data indexed is open data, which means it is openly licensed, and free to use.

On the site, you can:

The Getty Research Portal provides global access to digitised art history texts in the public domain. The catalogue is multilingual, and provides an open access platform from which to search and download digital copies of publications in the scholarly areas of art, architecture, material culture and other fields.

Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), based in the Netherlands, promotes "sustained access to digital research data". DANS actively encourages researchers to archive research data through the online archiving system EASY.