Via Peter Suber's [Open Access
News](http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html) comes this good
news:
> Grant Supports a Model for Graduate Students' Academic Pursuits
>
> The University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries will receive more
> than \$320,000 to improve Web-based tools for graduate students to
> support the writing of the doctoral dissertation, academic
> collaboration, and the accessibility of scholarly work.
> <http://media-newswire.com/release_1038710.html>
One of the project leaders is Susan Gibbons. I met Susan at [The
Successful
Repository](http://www.apsr.edu.au/successful/successful.htm), an APSR
event earlier this year. She spoke about ethnographic work done on the
behaviour of researchers, seeing what they did and what that meant for
the repository at Rochester.
I quoted Susan on challenges faced by academics in [my
presentation](http://www.adlaustralia.org/idea2006/presentations/ice-presentation/ice.slide.htm)
at the RUBRIC reports day last week:
> <http://www.apsr.edu.au/successful/gibbons1.ppt>
>
> - Research, writing and “publishing” cannot be pulled apart
>
> - Lots of time wasted with authoring issues
>
> - Backups
>
> - Versioning
>
> - Multiple access points
>
> - Mistake repositories for authoring system
>
The aims of the Rochester project have some overlap with the Integrated
Content Environment for Research and Scholarship (ICE-RS) which is about
to kick-off at USQ and the [Digital Scholar's
Workbench](http://www.apsr.edu.au/publications/preservation_of_word_processing_documents.html)
that Ian Barnes has been making at ANU.
This, for example is exactly what we'll be doing with ICE-RS, so
obviously we should be talking.
> Allow a librarian, graduate student, and faculty advisor to
> collaborate on the development of a dissertation;
>
> Provide graduate students with secure digital storage of their
> dissertation work in progress along with data, images, video, and
> other file types;
>
> Capture metadata about the dissertation during the writing process,
> which can serve as a model for ongoing capture of metadata about
> local, born-digital scholarship;
>
> And, finally, disseminate the completed dissertation through the
> Internet, supporting the scholarship of graduate students, faculty
> members, and other researchers.
>
> <http://media-newswire.com/release_1038710.html>
We have just added [a
page](http://ice.usq.edu.au/introduction/ice_rs.htm) to the ICE website
about ICE-RS, which is derived from the bid document that secured the
funding. (You can view the page as an HTML page, a slide presentation,
a PDF or download the original OpenDocument format source document – see
the icons top-right on the page.)
ICE-RS is supported by the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative as part of
the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An
Innovative Action Plan for the Future
(http://backingaus.innovation.gov.au)