OFIS Notes from 11 November, 2010

• Olga: grant data errors in her data; Marlon will track down. Daniel: Bill Cowan: errors in grant data. Daniel will have him submit error report in OFIS, and Marlon will follow up. Marlon says tell Bill forthcoming improvements: the Office of Research updating their software / he's meeting with them in February.
• Given last week's discussion of de-emphasizing Merit Report: what, now, are uses of OFIS for faculty?
  • publications -> upstream to web sources; pretty display of publications (possibly incl. bibtex output); find-an-expert on topics; OFIS could build a standardized webpage for a department or faculty (as it now does for CS; our Research Book seems a positive outcome; some 74 of 82 faculty have updated).
  • OFIS also offers faculty a view on the data recorded on campus, for lookups and so they can correct errors (which isn't likely a compelling reason from the faculty perspective, though it is for admin purposes)
  • Discussion of Refbase project / waiting for followup from Colin Bell
  • long discussion of making OFIS relevant to faculty- big problem is perceptions about errors "in OFIS" need to be corrected at sources. We now have contacts at OoR, GSO, IAP to do this, possibly.
  • need workflow to handle this, other than Marlon sending individual emails back to sources;
    • as discussed last week: hope to move to a process of department-level admins fixing errors; OFIS will become authoritative and send those errors back to the originating sources. (do sources prefer pretty forms, or can we get them machine-readable data? Obviously, 2nd is better, but they might not have processes for that).
  • Having OFIS as the entry-point for things such as grad-student information (which then gets reported to GSO initially) would be helpful for OFIS, certainly.
• Other reports:
  • Marlon: Faculty of Environment course-critiques in process. (They will give him properly formatted data).
  • Daniel: course-evaluation updates within Math: moving forward.
  • Vu: CV changes for research data are in production.

-- DanielAllen - 11 Nov 2010