RF6 Pecha Kucha: Reaping rich academic awards - augmentation of data within UQ eSpace
Channel: OpenRepos2012
Date: 2012-07-18

This talk was a Pecha Kucha from Session RF6 at Open Repositories 2012 (http://or2012.blogs.edina.ac.uk/). 

"Reaping rich academic awards - augmentation of data within UQ eSpace" - Lisa Kruesi, The University of Queensland, Australia

This paper was originally proposed by: Lisa Kruesi, Heather Todd, Amberyn Thomas, Margaret Gauld, The University of Queensland, Australia.

The University of Queensland (UQ) is a research-intensive university. It is one of the top universities in Australia and in the top 100 worldwide. University systems to record research activities are paramount to promoting, reporting and helping to measure research performance. In 2002 UQ eSpace began life as the UQ Library institutional repository, known as ePrintsUQ, using eprints.org software. To meet the evolving needs to manage a range of university research material and to increase its flexibility the eprints.org software was replaced with Fedora in 2007, along with a locally developed frontend interface called Fez. By 2011 UQ eSpace http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/ has evolved into an internationally renown repository system having reached number ten in the "Ranking of World repositories ." It is helping to promote UQ research worldwide through the augmented of eSpace with other UQ data management systems, that underpin critical research reporting needs required of Australian Universities by the Australian Government.

Ongoing development of the Fez software has enabled UQ eSpace to gradually extend its role in the management of official research publication outputs at The University of Queensland. In 2008, UQ eSpace staff worked with UQ's Office of Research to develop workflows to support the input and management of records for the annual Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) submission to the Australian Government and also worked with the UQ Graduate School to facilitate the electronic submission of research higher degree theses. Subsequently UQ eSpace took on a central role in the management of research publication outputs for a number of Australian Government initiatives such as the Research Quality Framework, the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) in 2010 and 2012.

Future plans to expand the functionality of eSpace are ambitious; these include augmentation of citation data for benchmarking; bibliometric profiling of individual academics, research groups, schools and faculties; the creation of online academic portfolios; and the means to comply with Australian Government open access mandates.

The system has insatiable requirements for clever and creative technology developers to come up with robust and accurate solutions. To help reap rich academic awards and recognition UQ eSpace depends upon ongoing collaboration, cooperation and communication throughout the University and with international open repositories partners.