Faculty Profiles - again Marcia Landen Zuzolo 14 Jun 1994 14:52 EST
Thanks to the dozen or so institutions who responded to my query about their use of faculty research profiles. Charlie Graham's recent posting about developing a cooperative database prompts me to post a summary of the responses I got. Several institutions have difficulty convincing their faculty of the value of an interest database. Faculty would rather locate collaborators through their known network of colleagues. High implementation costs for questionable value was another concern. Others said that these databases can be used as administrative tools in locating potential funding opportunities for faculty who participate. SPIN searches were often cited as a benefit to faculty. Some praised these databases as tools to locate collaborators, both within and outside of the institution, which also allows industry to tap into university resources. On the other hand, by not channelling industry through an administrative office (tech transfer, for example), faculty become potentially "available" to industry, and they do their own deals, often without protecting their own (much less the institution's) intellectual property. An argument for unlimited access is that it provides a window on the institution's research activities. Some institutions have their databases available on a WAIS server, others are content with hard copy, others use various internal software. I got one other response in French from a Canadian member of the list, but fluent French isn't one of our strong points in this office. Anyone still reading this message is obviously interested in the topic, so I'll briefly tell you what we do here at Indiana University. Our database has been in existence for five years or more. We maintain it on a dbase program on our local area network and upload information to the IU Gopher server. It is accessible to IU faculty, staff, and students only, as we believe our tech transfer folks have enough headaches without industry tapping into our researchers directly. We do use the 5th edition of the Rodman thesaurus, but also encourage Bloomington faculty to add their own terms and a paragraph description of their research interests. (It's wais indexed on our gopher, so we can search full text.) We use the database heavily in disseminating information to the Bloomington faculty, and we disseminate it via e-mail whenever possible. Human intervention is built into every step on purpose, as we felt that a completely electronic system would inundate faculty who happened to choose broad keywords. Some departments have nearly 100% participation in the database, some have very little. Participation is voluntary, but if a faculty member is not listed, it is unlikely that he/she will receive funding opportunity information directly. I appreciate the information I received--thanks. -Marcia Zuzolo Sponsored Research Services Indiana University xxxxxx@indiana.edu