About this Newsletter

Edition: February 2006 No.1

Audience: RUBRIC Board, Partner Project Managers and RUBRIC Central Staff.

Created by: Cameron Loudon, RUBRIC Business and Communications Coordinator.

Auto-generated from the Integrated Content Environment (ICE) using the ICE Word template.

FOSTER Info Day now 1st March

The RUBRIC Board kindly agreed to pay the major expenses of Partner Project Managers associated with the FOSTER Info Day on the Wednesday 1st March. This includes airfares, accommodation and dinner (for those who wish to arrive the night before), venue hire and catering during the event. Incidental expenses such as taxi and other charges will need to be charged back to the home university. The draft agenda can be found on RUBRIC SharePoint.

Carly Smith from USQ will organise all the details including flights. What we need from our partners is the following info as soon as possible:

• Full name and full contact details of your representative including phone numbers

• QANTAS flight numbers, departure and arrival locations in both directions and a frequent flyer number (if you have one). Flight information can be obtained by visiting Qantas Schedule Search

• Whether accommodation is required for the 28th of Feb

• Any special dietary needs (see SharePoint for current menu)

Please email Cameron Loudon ASAP with these details.

Event Details

FOSTER DAY Venue

Customs House on the 1st March

Sylvia Jones Boardroom

399 Queen Street Brisbane

Accommodation

Rothbury on Ann Brisbane (night of the 28th Feb only)

301 Ann Street Brisbane

Phone: 07 3239 8888

Web: www.rothburyhotel.com

First round repository evaluation

Our report on the first round of repository evaluations will go to FRODO projects by next Tuesday (the end of our cycle); we will forward the ARROW, DSpace and Fez teams edited reports with our impressions of their software to check for accuracy before circulating the full report more broadly. We will ask for feedback within a week.

Trac access

Board members and Project Partners can now access the Trac project management system we use to keep track of tasks and our weekly work-cycles at RUBRIC central. We spent several hours trying to integrate Trac security with SharePoint, but it was not to be so we have created a single generic board login.

This trouble interfacing two systems which are both supposed to be standards compliant is why the MAMS project is so important, and we will try again later in the project to address the issue of single sign-on. (You will be sent details securely, but ring Cameron Loudon on 07 4631 1422 if you want access immediately). The most useful view is the 'Roadmap' which shows what we are covering in our weekly work-cycles. This will give a feel for the kind of day to day activities being undertaken by RUBRIC central staff, particularly the technical team.

New email distribution lists

The RUBRIC project now has four email distribution lists. These lists include:

• RUBRIC Board

• RUBRIC Management committee at USQ

• RUBRIC Central team (full)

• RUBRIC Newsletter

To get the email addresses so you can send to lists, and to view the people that comprise each list, please see visit RUBRIC SharePoint.

Next RUBRIC Board Meeting

Please provide Louise Williamson with your availability for the next face to face meeting of the RUBRIC Project Board for the weeks commencing 20 March and 27 March. Louise has received advice from one Board member that they are not available for 13-15 March.  The venue for the meeting is likely to be Customs House in Brisbane which was the venue for the meeting on 21 November 2005.

Public Newsletter coming soon!

Starting in March the RUBRIC Central team will produce a monthly public newsletter. This newsletter will outline our activities in a broad way and won’t have any links back to SharePoint or other locations that require a logon. All information in this newsletter will be available for distribution and general public consumption.

Open Repositories 2006

Presentations from the meeting are held on the APSR website.

Of particular interest to RUBRIC were presentations by Neil McLean (view Neil’s PowerPoint) and Kerry Blinco (view Kerry’s PowerPoint) giving background information on how repository efforts fit together and how the e-Framework will build standards infrastructure, respectively.

MacKenzie Smith's presentations both contained a lot of useful contextualizing material on repositories, what they are, and how to implement an Institutional Repository. This material will be of great interest to partners. (View MacKenzie’s PowerPoint – Transition to a Broader Participation)

Ian Barnes showed further progress on using ICE templates to feed content directly into a repository with a single click, and acknowledged the work of the USQ team who built the template. (View Ian’s Presentation in PDF)

Welcome Amanda Nixon

Flinders University has appointed Amanda Nixon as their RUBRIC Project Manager. Amanda and Flinders are part of the IRUA. The RUBRIC Central team welcomes Amanda to the project and Peter Sefton and Cameron both had the pleasure of catching up with her at Open Repositories Conference 2006.

Contact Amanda >>>

ICE now creates the Newsletter!

This is first Newsletter created using ICE. This means we use the ICE Word Template to write the words then simply choose how we want it presented. In this case I chose the RUBRIC Newsletter and PDF versions. To see what the Newsletter looks like in Word go to SharePoint to see the both the HTML, PDF from the single source Word version. We will continue to improve the look as we move forward and this first attempt represents less than an hour of Cameron harassing Peter to set the basic business rules in the code.

Past Newsletters

If you have not received or would like to review any of the past RUBRIC Project Updates they are presently archived on RUBRIC SharePoint.

Links of Interest

USQ RUBRIC Project

USQ ICE Project

Trac Project Management

About del.icio.us

APSR Project

Acknowledgement

RUBRIC 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 (BAA)