Resource Sharing

 This ECAR research bulletin introduces the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation research on successful collaborative practices in the context of higher education. It details 20 collaborative success factors and maps them to relevant examples gleaned from research on IT collaboration conducted by ECAR.

Citation for this work: Pirani, Judith A., and Toby D. Sitko. “Happy Families, Good Fences, and Winning IT Collaborations” (Research Bulletin, Issue 15). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Developing a network of professional contacts creates an effective support system for information sharing.

Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.

What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward?

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

There are increasing demands on state education networks to provide more enterprise applications and services, including course management systems, video-on-demand content repositories, disaster recovery, and shared high performance computing GRIDS. Beyond the sizable economies of scale and efficiencies to be gained by constituent members, what are the benefits to our community? The panelists will discuss initiatives underway in their states and will describe some of the challenges, strategies and implementation issues to consider when contemplating centrally hosting enterprise applications and resources within your StateNet.

Starting and maintaining a new service offering is a significant undertaking that requires resources and time. Some services are tied directly to the network and local resources; these must be developed and run by the local state network. Others are not and can be shared by multiple state networks. Panelists will discuss how StateNets may offer services to other state networks, whereby recipients can then offer the service to their community as if it were their own.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a 3-year grant for nearly a million dollars to a partnership between William Paterson University, Rutgers University Libraries and NJEDge.Net to develop and deploy a statewide academic video-on-demand repository. The digital video repository (Fedora Commons-based) will he housed in the core of the NJEDge network and will provide "lectures-on-demand", licensed commercial videos, and locally owned videos. A Video Commons collection will be publically available including history, lectures from notables, and video documenting research and scientific advances. NJVid is notable for providing a statewide video strategy to accommodate any type of organization-higher education, K12, public libraries, museums and archives. A substantial part of this project will provide the resources to develop a statewide Shibboleth-based Identity management infrastructure, supporting statewide network authentication and authorization that can be used for many content resources. This presentation will describe the open source architecture and middleware applications that are under development.

In January 2007, 13 geographically separated liberal arts colleges joined with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Longsight Group on an initiative for shared, managed, institutional repository services. The resulting collaboration promises to dramatically lower the barrier for entry into an emerging technology for smaller colleges.