UCIT Committee

Newcomb Hall, Room 389
October 20, 2006

The meeting started with some good news from Mike McPherson: a new, more effective anti-spam system will be implemented by ITC on November 14 (for CMS email accounts). This commercial anti-spam solution from IronPort Systems is much better at reducing spam and generates almost no false positives (legitimate messages that are mis-identified as spam).

Kirk reviewed the progress made on objectives from last year:

  • UCIT's activities last year centered on IT and development with objectives to:
    • Make IT an explicit component of the capital campaign statement
    • Engage IT-active faculty in the development process
  • Subcommittees (for Humanities and Social Sciences, Science & Engineering, and Teaching & Student Experience) drafted documents to serve as source material for the campaign statement. There were presentations to administrators - and Development staff were engaged in meetings with UCIT members.
  • However, the final Campaign Statement (posted in September 2006) is quite brief, and IT is not prominent - and UCIT has also lost some of its contacts with Development due to shifts in personnel.
  • This year's follow-up activities will be to persist, but not repeat - and to get James Hilton better acquainted with faculty who might play a role in development activities by doing some regular informal faculty presentations for James.

New themes for this year include:

  • Collaboration
  • Access
  • Alignment
  • With this year's objectives to:
    • Consider collaboration, access, and alignment with respect to faculty engagement.
    • Potential topics related to these objectives are: classrooms and their support; faculty support and professional development (including incentives, recognition, and post-tenure review); getting the most from a decentralized organization; faculty participation in planning and development; important emerging technologies.

Martha Sites gave a brief overview of the activities of the Humanities and Social Sciences group (operating under the umbrella theme of "Enabling Digital Scholarship & Research"):

  • Their recommendations include funding opportunities for: a Center for Digital Scholarship; institutional infrastructure; support services; and academic programs.
  • Progress on efforts towards Enabling Scholarship & Research includes:
    • Defined a Technology Framework for Enabling Scholarship & Research (http://www.itc.virginia.edu/oit/org/Technology-Framework.pdf).
    • Made a Center for Digital Scholarship and a Center for Computational Sciences institutional priorities.
    • Began to leverage existing resources.
    • Developed a Digital Scholarship Service Model that leverages Library and ITC collaborations, establishes physical presence in the Scholars' Lab and Research Computing Lab, formalizes project services support, establishes "publishing" and digitization services, and advertises advising services.

The Scholars' Lab in Alderman Library was hosting its grand opening that afternoon. Martha gave an overview of the services this facility will provide to scholars and introduced Donna Tolson, the head of the Scholars' Lab. In response to a question about the audience for this lab, Martha responded that faculty and graduate students are the primary audience for the Scholars' Lab.

Dean Abernathy gave an overview of the broadening role of GIS in scholarship. GIS give scholars a new "operating environment" but the software is generally difficult to learn. Dean gave a demonstration of using Google Earth, and then showed how GIS has been used in several IATH projects (Aquae Urbis Romae, Salem Witch Trials, and Dante's Inferno). The use of GIS (and supporting hardware) in doing "real time" archeology was illustrated by current work in the reconstruction of Montpelier.

As interest in the use of GIS has grown and the number of applications has increased (in the Architecture school, Law, History, Psychology, etc.), there is concern about how to support GIS. Is it becoming a "core" application? Or still more of a "fringe" application? The GIS expert in the Library is way over-subscribed. Donna Tolson pointed out that student training is paying off with greater self-sufficiency and a greater diversity of users. Some students have already experimented with Google Earth before coming to UVa. It was noted that GIS is an example of data visualization - and that GIS is making its way into the arena of "social computing."

Given that all schools do not have a faculty IT orientation for new faculty, where are the "places to start" for faculty (particularly new faculty) in our decentralized environment? The new Scholars' Lab (Alderman Library) and Research Lab (Brown Library) are definitely places to start - and are examples of the Library and ITC trying to leverage their resources for the rest of UVa. Further advertising could be done using LSPs and TTSPs - by targeted invitations to particular groups - and by going to departments with outreach efforts. Also, ITC's Research Support staff offer research computing courses and colloquia.

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