RUBRIC Toolkit: About the RUBRIC Project and the Toolkit
The RUBRIC Toolkit
The content of the RUBRIC Toolkit developed organically and collaboratively during the two years of the RUBRIC Project. It captures the investigations, processes and experiences surrounding the implementation of an institutional repository (IR) as experienced by the collaboration of the eight Australian and New Zealand Universities participating in the project.
The RUBRIC Toolkit is aimed at new or existing institutional repository managers and captures the "best" of available advice, experience and outcomes available for institutional repository (IR) development in 2007. Project members have populated the Toolkit with useful resources and tools that can be used by other Project Managers and institutions implementing an IR. The RUBRIC Toolkit was released in October 2007 and will continue to reflect the findings of the Project until 31 December 2007.
For advice on navigating the Toolkit refer to the FAQs
The RUBRIC Project
The RUBRIC project (Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively) is sponsored by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) .
The SII Systemic Infrastructure Initiative funding for the project was part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA).
The RUBRIC Project was funded to establish and develop institutional repositories in participating universities. The development of the repositories incorporates best practice emerging from other projects funded by DEST between 2002 and 2005:
FRODO (Federated Repositories of Digital Objects) was the first round of SII funded projects
MERRI (Managed Environments for Research Repository Infrastructure) was the second round of funded projects and included RUBRIC.
RUBRIC Project Partners include:
Contact information is available on the RUBRIC website.
The Project Bid document is also available, outlining project objectives and deliverables.
Within the project, partners developed a strong peer network to:
work collaboratively
consider various technical issues
consider management issues such as copyright and submission workflows
consider policy issues.
save duplication of effort
“The RUBRIC Project: the benefits of collaboration through partnerships” (Picasso and Watson 2007) describes the collaborative nature of the peer to peer mentoring in the project.
A Project Overview was presented by Alan Smith in collaboration with Graeme Fox from Massey University at the 2007 Institutional Repositories Seminar in New Zealand.
Project Profile
A RUBRIC Central project team was established at USQ, comprising of a RUBRIC Project Manager, RUBRIC Project Officers, a Technical Manager, Technical Officers, a Metadata Specialist, a Business and Communications Manager.
Project Manager positions were established at participating universities and were employed locally at the participating universities on a part-time or full time basis. Different approaches were taken with advertising and whether recruitment was managed internally or externally. Some samples of the Position Descriptions have been included in the Planning section.
Time Frames
The RUBRIC Project commenced in the second part of 2005 at an administrative level. Staff at USQ were seconded to the project positions from late 2005. The partner project Manager positions were filled from January 2006 onwards. The original Project end date of June 2007 was extended through to December 2007 at the beginning of 2007, with approval from the Board and DEST. This was to take advantage of the extension of other projects such as ARROW and APSR and gave partners longer to embed new services into their organisations.
Project Operations
Hardware and software was originally deployed centrally at USQ. Communal instances of repository software were installed using virtual infrastructure and made accessible to participating universities. Repository software included:
Testing, evaluation, technical assistance, advice and problem solving was provided by RUBRIC Central. Project Managers evaluated repository software and tested functionality, workflow, processes, data ingest and migration. Repository management issues were investigated, discussed, developed and documented relative to the needs of each university.
In hindsight, the scope of the evaluation was unnecessarily narrow. RUBRIC did not evaluate the e-Prints software in use at the University of Southern Queensland because of the mandate to look at best practice emerging from specifically named projects running in Australia at the time. Yet this software has proved stable and fulfilled the institution's requirements for an open access repository.
Management and Communication
RUBRIC Board meetings were held bimonthly. The Project Managers met with RUBRIC Central staff weekly via teleconference to work on practical issues. The RUBRIC Central technical and project management teams met weekly, with work cycles being defined in TRAC. This work was based on the outcomes of the teleconferences and any practical issues raised at the Board meetings. Strategic Planning meetings were held a number of times during the project.
Project Communication Tools
The RUBRIC Project adopted a number of emerging technologies to manage communications in a dispersed environment, enabling the Partner Project Managers (PPMs) and RUBRIC Central staff to collaboratively work on documents together in a virtual collaborative space. This case study describing the tools and how they were used and established in the Project may be useful for other collaborative projects looking at their communication methods. These tools included:
Sharepoint intranet
Wiki
TRAC
Email lists
Teleconferences
Supporting Knowledge Creation - Using Wikis for Group Collaboration provides a case study on the collaborative tools used by the RUBRIC Project.
Massey University in New Zealand has gone on to share information and assist other NZ institutions by using their experience in the RUBRIC Project . By November 2007, both Waikato University and AUT had test repositories running after using scripts available in the RUBRIC Toolkit.
Blogs and a Google Group were created by some members of RUBRIC Central to record their ideas
The Cat's Meow (by RUBRIC Senior Technical Officer, Caroline Drury)
Metalogger (by RUBRIC Metadata Specialist, Neil Godfrey)
PT's Outing (by RUBRIC Technical Manager, Peter Sefton)
Institutional Repositories Community – ANZ (established by Alison Hunter from USQ)
Other well known blogs on IR topics were monitored. These included:
Papers and presentations were created by some members of the RUBRIC Group and have received public recognition:
'Building Institutional Repository Infrastructure in regional Australia' – Caroline Drury (OCLC Systems & Services Vol 23 Issue 4 2007 – as logged in the Emerald Insight database)
'Supporting Knowledge Creation: Using Wikis for Group Collaboration' – Kate Watson & Chelsea Harper (Educause Center for Applied Research October 2007)
Other papers have been presented at ECDL 2007 ( http://www.ecdl2007.org/papers.php) and Open Repositories Conference 2007 ( http://openrepositories.org/2007/)
Acknowledgements
Contributions to the RUBRIC Toolkit were made by members of the Project team:
Fiona Burton, Program Manager, Service Innovation Program (MQU)
Sue Craig, RUBRIC Project Manager, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Caroline Drury, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Graeme Fox, Systems Engineer (Massey)
Neil Godfrey, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Alison Hunter, Manager (Strategic Planning & Development) (USQ)
Deidre Lowe, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Simon McMillan, RUBRIC Project Manager (UNE)
Naomi Noble, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Amanda Nixon, Flinders Academic Commons Project Officer (Flinders)
Marisa Parker, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Vicki Picasso, RUBRIC Project Manager (UoN)
Peter Sefton, RUBRIC Central (USQ)
Sit-ling Tull, RUBRIC Project Officer, (Murdoch)
Kate Watson, RUBRIC Coordinator (USC)
References and Further Reading
Refer to the Further Reading section at the end of the Toolkit for bibliographic details of works referenced in this section.
“RUBRIC Toolkit: About the RUBRIC Project and Toolkit” produced July 2007
