Another ICE-RS-like project

Via Peter Suber's Open Access News 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, 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  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 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 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)