Moving Ahead with Collaboration: Renee helps Jim on with his coat
Friday March 2, DLT, ITECH and the ITS Emerging Technologies and IT Consultants groups had a two hour meeting, at the end of which Jim Leous needed help getting his coat on. Luckily Renee was sitting beside him and obliged. After Jim left, there was an awkward silence as folks tried hard not to say anything negative about him.
We had a very productive meeting; we kicked off with short introductions on what each of us does, and then discussed possible ways we might collaborate, beyond helping each other on with coats. Topics discussed included training, project management, Web 2.0, Shibboleth and Identity and Access Management, a central repository for person data and Service Oriented Architecture. Four specific areas of interest emerged:
1. Mairéad described the Internet2 Shibboleth in Research Library pilot: Penn State has just been invited to participate in a pilot to examine the reasons why Shib adoption in US research libraries has been slow. Renee, Mairéad, Lynn and Lisa are already on this team; names to Mairéad if you're interested in participating.
2. Betty Nirnberger brought up some issues around desktop reimaging that would benefit from closer collaboration with ITS such as shared testing models, Vista implementation and compatibility testing. Agreement that these issues will be pursued through the Desktop Reimaging Working Group. DLT has recently been working with the ITS Classroom and Lab Computing group on shared desktop management which will help address the issues Betty brought up.
3. Andrew Calvin agreed to lead a group to look at Social Networking tools - blogs, wikis, etc. There is interest in the Libraries in blogs for subject libraries or classes, for example, as well as individual ones. Interest was also expressed in an ITS run Wiki service. Names to Andrew if you're interested in this one.
4. The final area was repositories - development of, integration with, cost of, use of .... Jim Leous gave examples of interest at PSU in archiving and making data sets accessible as well as the desire or requirement for open access. Mairéad's taking names for this one while we look for someone to lead it.
Thanks to Janis Mathewson for pulling this meeting off in such a short time frame, and thank you to all who attended ready to share information and look at ways of working together.
Did I capture all of the meeting discussion here?
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This was a productive meeting in terms of connecting faces to names and identifying areas where collaboration would be beneficial to many. I do have one correction to these notes. I never really helped Jim with his coat. If I recall correctly, I watched him struggle, ball it up into a small bundle, and exit without actually wearing the coat. Sorry Jim. We need to work on collaborating within ET.
I wish I was there to see the coat fiasco, sounds interesting (sorry Jim).
At any rate I'd like to be actively involved in the repository discussions.
There are many unanswered questions that will impact the back end (what I really care about) of the repositories. This being the case for just the libraries or all of Penn State. We need robust and scalable solutions, notice that with an (s). I think there will be may different ways to approach these issues. Cost being a big one. I'm not going to be a big fan to continue to just buy disks to store this stuff without a data migration plan through life cycle of equipment most specifically SAN/NAS etc. If anyone hasn't guessed I don't much care how we get the data in or the tools used to present the information (I care some) as long as they are also robust and scalable.
Many products are available but choosing the right animal for the job isn't as easy as it sounds. The scale and price goes from institutional repositories that store "valuable" data that has to meet compliance requirements or can never be reproduced to picture files that should be kept but are of much lesser value and could be reproduced if there was a data loss.
Ok, I'm done, all to be included in the discussions!