What the RUBRIC Project will Achieve
Universities who have embarked on repository projects have all found that significant issues such as population of the repository, acquisition policies, strategies for community engagement and marketing are equally important to technical issues. There is a significant cultural change factor to deal with in the scholarly publishing revolution and policy issues only begin to emerge once people begin deployment of the technology.
RUBRIC will explore where institutional repositories fit in the regional institutional landscape. It will address these issues primarily with regional organizations by assisting them in the process of establishing infrastructure and by enabling them to capture and provide regional, national and international exposure to the research output of their staff and students in a sustainable manner. RUBRIC will focus heavily on the human side of repository developments. While the initial focus will be on managing research output, there is also a basic premise to explore the contention that faculty who can conduct good research can excite future researchers through allied educational processes.
Through partnerships with larger organizations, RUBRIC will explore synergies between regional deployment issues in an international setting, feed into the product development lifecycles of FRODO projects as appropriate and draw from existing expertise already developed in the first round of activity. RUBRIC will assist its partners and IRUA members with repository establishment and automatic population. The latter will lead to an exploration of the mechanisms required to implement open linking between repository metadata and full-text resources so that original research documents can be obtained. These demonstrator repositories will allow the institutions to explore the issues and potential of institutional repositories.
The RUBRIC environment centred at USQ will enable broader testing of the FRODO solutions with other types of repository solutions, exploring integration issues and applications to e-Learning. RUBRIC will develop strategies for the storage of research output and tools for the use (and possibly automatic aggregation) of stored objects for application to e-Learning, because the capacity to produce derivative combinations provides the ability to grow the meaning of digital objects over time.
