A new project for USQ: RUBRIC

2005-08-23

Yesterday, the Australian Government decided to share out some money:

Australia’s research information infrastructure will be enhanced with today’s announcement that the Australian Government will invest a further $19.4 million to fund nine projects under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII).

One of the the nine projects, described in this Word document (pretending to be a web page!) will be led by USQ:

Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively (RUBRIC) Lead Institution University of Southern Queensland $3,872,700

RUBRIC will develop infrastructure and capability across regional and smaller universities to maximise access to digital research resources. This project wishes to take on the best practice developed from the existing FRODO projects and develop similar institutional repositories in thirteen other universities. RUBRIC will provide a means for these institutions to work in a structured framework using the latest tools, to act collectively and to develop the expertise that will be necessary to respond to emerging needs of the Research Quality and Accessibility Frameworks across universities.

Partners: University of New England, University of the Sunshine Coast, University of Newcastle (for the Intensive Research Universities of Australia), Massey University

FRODO?

That's described here:

First Stage - Current Projects

Four major demonstrator projects are directly related to addressing these goals, namely:

Meta Access Management System Project (MAMS) - MAMS will provide an essential "middleware" component to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of Australia’s higher education research information infrastructure. It will develop a new conceptual architecture which is capable of supporting multiple, independent models, and which is implemented locally within organisations, with the potential for inter-institutional communication. http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/projects/MAMS/

The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) - ARROW will identify and test a software solution or solutions to support best-practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing. It will develop a repository and associated metadata to support independent scholars (those not associated with institutions). http://arrow.edu.au/

Towards an Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) - APSR will have an overall focus on the critical issues of the access, continuity and sustainability of digital collections. It will also build on a base of demonstrators for digital continuity and sustainability, embedded in developmental repository facilities within partner institutions. http://apsr.edu.au/ and

Australian Digital Theses Program Expansion and Redevelopment (ADT) - ADT will redevelop the existing central metadata repository of the Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT) to increase its coverage and utility to the national and international research community. The repository’s content will expand to include metadata about all Australian higher degree theses. http://adt.caul.edu.au/adtariic.html

Collectively these are called the Federated Repositories of Digital Objects (FRODO) projects.

I contributed a few words to the RUBRIC proposal that helped land this funding, others did much, much more work. I'll introduce them later...