Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a one-year pilot study to investigate advances in institutional repository (IR) development. The project was initiated by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and was designed to learn about successes and challenges experienced by university libraries that had made a substantial commitment to developing and sustaining an IR. Three sites with varying approaches to IR development were studied using the comparative case study method. The cases are highly illustrative of the kinds of progress, but also the tradeoffs, being made in active IR development, and the report provides a provisional baseline for determining realistic goals and promising approaches for IR development at similar institutions.

The Fluid Project is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.

Fluid combines both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of design quality. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source projects.

Fluid will encourage user-centered design practices within community source software. To this end, we are creating a designer's toolkit that will offer useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation. Members of the Fluid team are available to provide usability and accessibility support within the Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle communities.