Technology Support for the Research Community
by Fred Siff, Vice President and CIO
Over the summer, one of our peer institutions sent, to the research community, a survey about central computing support. They had no formal programs or processes and wanted to find out what some best (or even extant) practices might be. We responded. We have yet to hear back. So much for surveys.
Their quest came out of a desire that central computing in research universities have for reaching out to their research community. Historically, at most institutions, university central computing has provided technology infrastructure and administrative systems. At UC, we do this, but, more important, we believe, we are doing more and more in very direct support of teaching and learning.
Now it is time - and there is both capacity and capability - to focus on support of research. This university is 45th in the country in funded research. We have an information technology infrastructure commensurate with that. (Recall we were ranked number 32 on Yahoo's 100 Most Wired Colleges and Universities list the last time it was credible.) From that desire to do more, last spring, Howard Jackson, VP for Research and Advanced Studies, and I sponsored a seminar in which a panel of the University's leading researchers talked about their computing support needs with an audience of fellow researchers. The video of that seminar is available online at cba.uc.edu/cf/SpEvents/Comprsrch022803_hi_files/0Media.asx .
That dialog resulted in the establishment of the Center for Research Computing Support, jointly sponsored by the Office of Research and Advanced Studies UCit, announced in October. This is a virtual center, designed to aggregate extant services: we believe that we can provide services which would benefit researchers by leveraging, aggregating, and extending services we are already providing to other elements of the community. Many of these are outlined in this issue of UCit now, devoted to the support of the research community. Mike Lieberman has authored two articles, one on the services offered by the new Office which he leads and the other on the promise which we think MIT's research management system, COEUS, holds for UC in the light of its compatibility with the new SAP financial system being put in place for the University. Other articles of import to researchers are those by Paul Czarnecki regarding ongoing communications, Mike Alexander on data hosting services and Tom Streeter on the new Presentation Technologies and Services unit. The latter provides state-of-the-art equipment and services for both classroom and research presentations including videoconferencing services, an expressed need for collaborative researchers.
These services are not meant to take the place of or even to use research funds, but to augment them. Even funded researchers may not have funding to do data backups, or implement new security protections, or to engage in software licensing negotiations. Many of the new services are available to researchers in the proposal stage, before funding is available - like large data set storage, videoconferencing among physically distant collaborators, and the like.
We hope that these services add to the capabilities of our researchers, become heavily used, and lead to more support we might design and deliver. Let us know.
You may send email to the author at Fred.Siff@UC.Edu.
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