On Mon, 6 Jun 1994 17:09:47 EST, Marcia Landen Zuzolo wrote:

>I'm interested in hearing from institutions that make the research interests of
>their faculty/staff available on a Gopher server and/or World Wide Web.

Marcia: I am considering how to do this at Louisiana State University.

Faculty interest/expertise databases have great potential as a tool to
forge inter-university collaborations, and to enable industry to tap into
university resources. However this potential is unlikely to be realized if
there are dozens or even hundreds of similar, unlinked databases on the net.

I would like to see universities move toward a common data standard: this
way we could eventually link the various databases and make it possible for
another party to search all the participating organizations at once. The
first step would be to agree on some common database fields, a thesaurus,
and an Internet search engine (while a thesaurus is not essential, it
gives the searcher some confidence that terms he enters are likely to
generate hits).

At LSU we will use a mail survey to obtain information from faculty; I am
thinking of organizing the data in a dBASE format (to be compatable with
SPIN).  We will ask faculty to code their interests using the NSF/NIH
keyword thesaurus version 4 because it will also be used for automated
faculty interest matches with the SPIN funding opportunity database.

We will probably use a WAIS server to enable text searches on the
database. For WAIS to work, the desired fields of the database
would have to be exported to a text format; at this stage it will not
matter what database the data was originally organized in. Although I
mentioned a standardized data structure, use of WAIS would allow a rather
flexible data structure with just a few standard elements.

In response to Mike McCallister's comment, I believe the offer of regular,
automated, personalized funding searches on the SPIN funding database will
encourage our faculty to respond to a questionnaire about their interests
(automated faculty match is a feature offered by InfoEd, the vendor of
SPIN). I anticipate our questionnaire will give faculty the option not to
be posted on the public database, but this is a question that has not been
discussed here yet.

This office did a similar survey a few years ago, and the response was
excellent. About 14 keywords were requested, and faculty were invited to
add a narrative of their interests; they responded to the stated purpose
of sending them appropriate funding opportunities.

I will be very interested to receive comments on this approach to an
inter-university faculty interests/resources database.

           Charlie
Charlie Graham, Director, Office of Sponsored Research
117D David Boyd Hall, Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 50310       504-388-8692    xxxxxx@UNIX1.SNCC.LSU.EDU