Collaboration, Presentations/Speeches, and Resource Sharing

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.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. In 2006, ECAR distributed three surveys: the first was designed simply to ascertain whether the responding institution collaborated in significant ways; the second asked responding collaborators to describe their experiences, views, outcomes, concerns, and readiness with and for collaborations; and the third asked self-identified non-collaborators in IT to describe the barriers to collaboration they face, the cultural assumptions and beliefs of their institutions, and their views about the possible future for IT collaboration at their institutions. The survey responses offer a rich snapshot of how and when colleges and universities collaborate, the nature of the collaborations themselves, and a sense of the effectiveness of IT collaborations in higher education.