Nearly 80 students have uploaded their honors theses into the D-Space digital repository that was established at Swem as part of the spring pilot with the Charles Center. DSpace is organized around “communities” and collections. In the pilot project, we established community called Research @ William and Mary that currently is made up of four collections:

• Honors Theses
• Research Journals
• Williamsburg Documentary Projects
• Working Papers and Projects

The repository accepts just about any kind of media you want to throw at it, and the library IT staff is in the process of purchasing additional storage. Faculty or students who have need to store research products of all kinds in an organized way with rich metadata might find this a valuable resource. You can subscribe to updates in the collection by email or RSS. I’m getting using email to get a daily update of new theses and find the diversity of titles fascinating. Recent updates have ranged from A Million Little Pieces, Incorporated: How Oprah Winfrey Maintained Her (Non)Capitalist Media Empire to The Impact of Ambient Noise on Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) Nestling Begging.

I’m hoping we can continue to work together with the library staff to expand this resource.

IT Conversations | Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators | Greg Wilson

A couple of years ago, I met Jon Udell at the University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy after following his columns for a long time in Byte and Infoworld. He’s been an innovator in fields as diverse as groupware, screen casting and community uses of open software. (His documentary screencast on Wikipedia’s heavy metal umlaut page is a classic.)

Among his many current activities, Jon hosts a series of interviews with IT innovators on the T Conversations Network that includes this great discussion of some the problems inherent in providing high performance computing resources.

Greg Wilson recently, a faculty member at the university of Toronto, gave a talk entitled High-Performance Computing Considered Harmful. Wilson explains why HPC can’t be all about speed and power. Instead, we must also care, more than we have in the past, about human productivity, correctness, and reproducibility.

Well worth a listen given the potential contributions of HPC across the curriculum–and the problems investing in initiatives like this presents.

Harvard Research to Be Free Online - New York Times

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard has voted to create a free digital repository that would include articles and monographs that previously would have been restricted to scholarly journals that charge extraordinarily high prices to very small readerships. The move was described as the first step in freeing knowledge from the “stranglehold of commercial publishers:

In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.

The repository which was created as part of a set of recommendations from a provost’s committee on Scholarly publishing, would include all articles unless the author opts out of having the included. Opponents of the measure argue that the digital repository system may diminish the quality of research by bypassing rigorous peer reviews provided by the journals or by eliminating the subsidy of less popular journals by income from more popular ones.

Physics, among other disciplines, has been freely distributing research papers for more than a decade without any detrimental effects to the field’s major journals.

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?: Scientific American: “”

M. Mitchell Waldrop’s excellent introduction to “open notebook” science in Scientific American fits nicely with some of the work we’re doing to support the Charles Center’s initiative on expanding undergraduate research at the College. My class last semester helped develop a web site that will help students in all disciplines make the process of their research more open and transparent. Most students get lots of exposure to the products of scholarly work, but they are much less likely get much exposure to complexities of producing that scholarly work. As Ron Gross noted in The Independent Scholar’s Guide:

Rarely do researchers or writers “let their hair down,” revealing that they started where each of us must start: with mere infatuation for a subject… Established researchers rarely portray the faltering steps by which they came to pinpoint their purposes, chose their subject, sharpen their skills. By the time the work of the scholar or scientist comes to our attention, it is usually well packaged as a finished monograph, a carefully-crafted article, a well-honed paper, a polished book, a museum worthy collection or display, a documentary on film or videotape, or as some other finished work. This final project seems to have sprung full-grown from the author’s head. So we get a misleading picture of how intellectual and creative projects get started.
Gross, Independent Scholar’s Guide, Introduction to Chapter Two: From Messy Beginnings to Finished Product

In open-notebook science, blogs, wikis, and social network tools are used to provide a way to share the everyday decisions that shape an actual research project–both the successes and the failures. Scholarly papers offer clear views of what has been accomplished, but generally don’t provide much insight into the things that didn’t work. Often those details are precisely the ones that can jump-start the work of other scientists, making the whole research process more productive an efficient. The OpenWetWare initiative at MIT, for example, has expanded well beyond it’s beginnings graduate students refining protocols for getting DNA cultures to grow:

In short, OpenWetWare has quickly grown into a social network catering to a wide cross-section of biologists and biological engineers. It currently encompasses laboratories on five continents, dozens of courses and interest groups, and hundreds of protocol discussions–more than 6100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users.

There’s much to think about in this article and about it’s implications for undergraduate research. Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group summarizes his vision of scholarly publishing in a way that fits nicely with our goals TIP’s support of undergraduate research:

Our real mission isn’t to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication,” he says. “We’ve recognized that the Web can completely change the way that communication happens.” Among the efforts are Nature Network, a social network designed for scientists; Connotea, a social bookmarking site patterned on the popular site del.icio.us, but optimized for the management of research references; and even an experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment.

Waldrop has posted the article in Scientific American’s Edit This section where readers get to collaborate with the author in giving the story its final form.

A number of student-faculty IT projects kicked off this week, and it’s clear from the email that hit my inbox this afternoon that we have a chance to have a real impact on the quality of the work environment of students by helping them learn some of the basics of project management. Many of the tools and techniques that we take for granted within the technology world are as unfamiliar to our faculty as the biochemistry of genetics or the nature of subatomic particles are to me. If we can help our fellows and the students funded our grants understand the basic habits that lead to successful project management, we’ll provide them with some valuable for the future.

Effective project management requires consistent, effective communication. The consequences of poor communication have been well documented.

There are dozens of checklists to effective project management, but one of the best is at Lifehack with 16 Steps to Project Management. The specific steps may differ from project to projects, but there’s an underlying theme that is pretty clear. See if you can figure out what it is.

1. Determine the objective and specific desired outcome. Write it down.

4. Begin “brainstorming” and create scenarios on how to achieve the desired outcome (this may have be broken down into sub-tasks). Make a date when all this creative thinking will be finished and a written draft can be printed and shared.

6. Determine and identify the tools (capital, equipment, machinery), the people (administration, sales, suppliers, customers), and the time required to complete the objectives. Write this down.

12. The leader must follow-up on all dates and compromises. Make this information public to all others involved in the project. Communicate all deliveries of sub-tasks, or lack of delivery with the group.