About this Newsletter

Edition: March 2006 No.1

Release Date: Thursday 9 March 2006

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 Information Day

The RUBRIC FOSTER Information Day was held on Wednesday March 1 at Customs House in Brisbane. Most of the team was able to get together at the Beach House Bar and Grill the night before to share an informal chat. I was able to reprise my role as a waiter but we can only hope I prove to be a better comms coordinator.

The Day itself proved very useful for everyone concerned albeit a little overwhelming. Our guest speakers included:

• Belinda Weaver from the APSR Fez Project who provided an excellent insight initiating and managing IR Project at UQ.

• Alison Hunter from USQ ePrints Project who outlined what was required in Becoming an ‘Olympic’ Repository Coordinator.

• Vicki Picasso who gave a detailed insight the Project Management requirements at the University of Newcastle.

• Amanda Nixon who described how a grass roots DSpace IR got going at Flinders University.

• The usual suspects from RUBRIC Central including Peter Sefton, Caroline Ayers, Neil Godfrey and Cameron Loudon.

The USQ Integrated Content Environment (ICE) has been used to prototype a FOSTER Day package of resources including the agenda with links to the presentations and other useful documents.  At present this package is being hosted from within the Trac system so log on to SharePoint and look in the Announcement section to get the username and password. If you get stuck please call Cameron on 0412 673 941 or email loudon@usq.edu.au. In the future we should be able to provide this package in advance of any event.

Email Problems!

It has been brought to my attention that some of our RUBRIC Board and Partner Project Managers may not have been receiving emails from the RUBRIC Central team or other USQ based project staff.

The problem has now been rectified; however you may have email in your USQ email account that has not been forwarded to your home or university email account. All RUBRIC Project people have a USQ email account established as part of their SharePoint access even if you are not a USQ staff member.

To view your email please logon to USQ Webmail using your SharePoint username and password. You can forward or delete any email from this point.

In addition the problems associated with the activation of the RUBRIC email distribution lists would also now have been corrected.

Thank you to everyone for being so understanding especially with the number of test emails I have been sending recently.

Email distribution lists are go!

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

• RUBRIC Partner Project Managers

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

Access Grid

The RUBRIC Central Team visited the USQ Access Grid today. This impressive facility provides high speed multiple feed video and audio conferencing among Australian Universities.

RUBRIC Central would like to trial the Access Grid for demonstrating the progress on the IRs and for more general conferencing between Project Partners.

Please check to see if your campus is connected to the Access Grid and would be willing to help out with a trial. Contact Cameron who will make the arrangements.

First round repository evaluation

The RUBRIC Central technical team has completed the first of many rounds of software evaluation on DSpace, Fez and Vital. We spent around three weeks with each product, installing it and trying it out with USQ content from our ePrints repository.

Our report has been checked with the FRODO projects responsible for the solutions and some of their comments and suggestions incorporated into a revised version. The report is online as part of the FOSTER Information Day package. At this stage we would like to keep distribution of this document within the RUBRIC Project Partner network as feedback is still trickling in from the FRODO projects.  While the report was designed to be as balanced as possible, we do not think that public statements that might be seen as endorsing one or more products, or unfairly critiquing others, would be helpful to the RUBRIC agenda. Rest assured that we do plan to publish our work more broadly in appropriate forums at some point in the not too distant future.

The document is available from the rubric-central site (same login as Trac).

DEST JISC visit USQ

Alan Smith and the RUBRIC Team had the pleasure of hosting representatives from both DEST and JISC on Tuesday 28 February as part of the e-Framework stream of the RUBRIC Project. The visit included presentations from the RUBRIC team, an e-Framework Board Meeting and a visit to the famous USQ Japanese gardens in a torrential downpour. I think “she’ll be right mate” were my famous last words before we all decided to have a frolic in the rain.

Next RUBRIC Board Meeting

The next RUBRIC Board Meeting will be a teleconference on 20 March 2006 commencing at 10 am QLD time (southern states are still on daylight saving).  Louise Williamson will send out a call for agenda items soon.

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.

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.

The Trac guest username and password is available from the Announcements section of RUBRIC SharePoint. Alternatively call Cameron on 0412 673 941 or 07 4631 1422 if you get confused.

Public Newsletter coming soon!

Starting this month the RUBRIC Central team will produce a 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.

Welcome Partner Project Managers

Simon McMillan - University of New England

Kate Watson - University of the Sunshine Coast

Alison Hunter - University of Southern Queensland

Vicki Picasso - University of Newcastle (IRUA liaison)

Amanda Nixon - Flinders University

Sit-Ling Tull - Murdoch University

Russell Hewitt - Massey University (FOSTER Day rep)

Fiona Burton - Macquarie University (FOSTER Day rep)

Staffing Changes

Stephen Braithwaite, one of two RUBRIC technical officers, has left the project. Corey Wallis from the USQ library has been seconded for eight weeks to fill in. Corey is an experienced systems administrator with a good deal of exposure to Institutional Repository software through his involvement with USQ ePrints. This transition has slowed us down, but Corey has hit the ground running and is making a positive contribution to the team after only a week or so.

During the transition Caroline Ayers worked particularly hard, including evenings and weekends to make sure that we had demonstration servers ready for the FOSTER information day. The rest of RUBRIC Central would like to express our sincere thanks to Caroline for her fortitude and dedication.

ICE creates the Newsletter and more!

This Newsletter has been 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. We will continue to improve the look as we move forward.

ICE was also used to build an IMS package of the FOSTER resources on the fly. Very impressive!

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)