At the end of May I attended the most recent euroCRIS membership meeting, hosted by CINECA at their offices in the suburbs of Bologna, Italy. Membership meetings are an opportunity for euroCRIS members to meet and share information on recent progress and innovation. The programme also includes invited presentations from the organising country as well as a special topic session, which in Bologna concerned CRIS in a university IT environment.
The special topic session included presentations on the integration of CRIS with publications repositories and other systems at the Politecnio di Torino, the Università degli studi di Verona and the distributed Italian National Research Centre (CNR). The U-GOV information management system for higher education institutions (developed by CINECA) seems to be widely used in Italy, so the focus of several presentations here and in the Italian Session was the integration of this with other institutional systems, including open access repositories (OAR). In this special topic session, Rosa Scoble and Lorna Mitchell of Brunel University were also able to present progress on developing institution-wide data sharing mechanisms as part of the JISC-funded BRUCE (Brunel Research Under a CERIF Environment) project (http://bruceatbrunel.wordpress.com/).
All membership meetings provide an opportunity for euroCRIS members to provide updates on recent progress and innovation. The session at the Bologna meeting included two UK presentations, one by Richard Gartner of King's College London on the JISC-funded Measuring Impact under CERIF (MICE) project (http://mice.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/) and my own round-up of UKOLN RIM activities including CERIFy.
Membership meetings usually kick-off with reports from the euroCRIS board and task groups. Anne Asserson's round-up of euroCRIS objectives included some interesting news from the 2nd Workshop on CRIS, CERIF and Institutional Repositories held earlier that week in association with CNR in Rome. A key aim of the current euroCRIS strategic plan is to help the open access repository community to move from using Dublin Core to CERIF. She noted that a declaration emerging from the Rome workshop argued the need to align (converge) developments in CRIS and OAR for the benefits of the wider research community.
We representing the communities concerned with CRIS and OAR hereby declare:
- We recognise that research information should be integrated seamlessly whether the primary source concerns management information or scholarly publications;
- We resolve to develop an architecture and data model suitable for the purposes of the research community;
- We resolve jointly to develop further and utilise the CERIF model since it is the EU recommendation to member states;
- We resolve to develop appropriate services to act on the data model within the architecture.
Source: A. Asserson, "Strategy / External Relations," presentation at the euroCRIS membership meeting, Bologna, 26 May 2011
The euroCRIS meeting was held in conjunction with the 3rd meeting of the VOA3R (Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository) project (http://voa3r.eu/). This EU-funded project is developing social networking tools for the sharing of publications and other research outputs in the agriculture, food and environment domain. The second day of the euroCRIS meeting included some presentations on VOA3R, including on the use of the OAI-PMH-compliant U-GOV-Research software to help manage access to publications. Interesting presentations in the Italian Session, included an overview by Susanna Mornati (CILEA Interuniversity Consortium) of CRIS solutions that could built upon a bewilderingly large number of open source software and an outline by Imma Subirats (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) of a Linked Open Data approach to the management and encoding of bibliographic metadata (LODE-BD) as part of the FAO's AIMS (Agricultural Information Management Standards) initiative (http://aims.fao.org/).
The full programme of the Bologna meeting is available from the CINECA Web site (http://eurocris.cineca.it/node/668). Presentation slides are available from the euroCRIS Web site:
http://www.eurocris.org/Uploads/Web%20pages/members_meetings/201105%20-%20Bologna,%20Italy/
