A bit more about BRII

I am new in this post so I have been reading everything that comes to my hands which is related to this and similar projects in Oxford University. That includes websites and other kinds of documentation. For example, the project proposal and project plan which were written for JISC - the funders of the project - way before I joined the team. A summary of those is presented in our Project Website. I have also found the PowerPoint presentation below very informative. It explains the reasons for starting this project. The presentation was designed by Sally Rumsey BRII's Project Manager. From the presentation you can see there is a gap in data provision and lot's of inficiencies at managing research management information at Oxford. One of the main reasons for this would be the University's federated structure, with extreme unit independence and autonomy which leads to lack of communication between them.



Reading this documentation helps me to build my own picture of the context of the project, the needs it will be fulfilling and to understand my role in the project in detail.

As I see it the BRII project has two sides. One is the technical side which involves the creation of an infrastructure consisting of research management data digital repositories - harvested from different sources within Oxford - and a series of web services which will reuse those data in new contexts and for new purposes. The other side is the Advocacy side which will involve a stakeholder and a user-needs analysis. The aims of these will be to identify sources of data for the repository, establish connections between the people and objects represented by that data and establish new uses for that data based on the needs of our stakeholders. Both sides of the coin aim at gathering, collecting, and conecting together information from different areas in Oxford without interfering with the University's business processes.

I have also come across this interesting project called Scoping digital repository services for research data management... it's a long name but it is a big project as well. They are looking at digital repositories for research data generated at Oxford (as opposed to research management data which is the target of the BRII project.) Print this post