Highlights
IT Services internship: Suzy and Adelina setting up for an interview
Congratulations to the ORDS project team! We can now offer a service for researchers to securely create, populate and share relational databases. This is the culmination effort from across IT Services over several years where the team navigated a complicated funding environment. James W, Meriel and Mark will now promote and support researchers in using the service as part of an early-life support IT service project.
This has also been another great year for the Digital Humanities Summer School. I won’t say much here because James C has written a comprehensive DHoxSS 2014 report himself. Needless to say, congratulations to James, Sebastian, Scott, Kathryn W, and all the teachers involved in giving workshops.
We hosted Adelina Tomovo and Suzy Shepherd as part of the IT Services Internship programme. Suzy and Adelina worked with Rowan to create the new Open Spires website. The website is based on what we learnt on the Jisc Software Hub project last year and uses the same Drupal cataloguing admin interface. The new site is more focused on marketing open resources and in much of the effort went into making compelling film and a visually appealing and well written site. This is the first step for open spires project and Rowan will be taking it forwards over the coming months.
Progress against plans for last 3 months
Engagement statistics, June to August 2014
There’s a considerable drop in engagement this quarter compared with others, but this is to be expected during June to August when most researchers are away. We use this period to focus on projects, events and web resource development (and indeed go on holidays ourselves).
- With regards to project planning (1) we are not involved in the Matrix replacement and X5 updates, (2) the ORDS ELS project has been approved, (3) OxGarage project brief is about to be started, (4) Oxford BNC-web PID will be submitted to the next review, (5) we will take an updated Live Data PID to the RDM working group in November, (6) we are not involved in the researcher dashboard at this stage, (7) the datastage project has been renamed to ReDDs and the scope changed to just focus on deposit from ORDS to ORA:Data, and the project request has been approved.
- DHOxSS 2014 was a resounding success, including special recognition for the organisers from the Director.
- The first phase of the open oxford portal, called OxSpires went live end of August.
- CatCore, Diva and OxGame projects are closed.
- James has passed the detailed for another ‘what to do with data series’ to the ITLP team
- ORDS is now live
Plans for next 3 months
- Continue to define and advertise our specialist services, and organise ourselves into teams according to the demand for each one.
- Grow the ORDS user community (and fix any bugs that surface)
- Successfully deliver our parts of current projects: VALS, Web CMS Service – Phase 1, DiXit
- Try to get new projects funded e.g. Live Data, OxGarage, Oxford BNC-web, Redds
- Contribute to the StaaS project by delivering the oxdropbox work package
- Initiate a new internal project (in first instance) to work out how to deliver a whole lab RDM solution such as the Hub (see Jisc Neurohub project)
- Deliver our communications plan
- Work with comms team to contribute to the new IT services discovery and engagement site
- Work with management to hone the focus on the research support team i.e. workshop on 28th October