09 January 2009

Progress Report January 2009

Happy New Year!

Most of the team is back at work this week after a break over the Christmas New Year period and pressing on with the project. Our Business Analyst, Damien Ingle, started just before Christmas and has spent some time with both Swinburne and Newcastle staff gathering information to feed into stakeholder requirements and institutional analyses.

Rebecca Parker, our Subject Matter Expert (because she actually works with the Swinburne Research Bank repository) is putting together a set of researcher personal name use cases and our Programmer, Tom Rutter, has begun development of tools to work with personal names.

Now that we have a better idea of costs, it seems as though there may be enough funding to take the project beyond the original March deadline or to increase the resources devoted to it over a shorter time frame. So, while we are still not being overly ambitious, it may be that we can do a little more than we had originally thought. Fingers crossed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The use cases Stuart describes are starting to come together. So far I've looked into researchers who prefer to use their middle names in some publishing contexts; researchers who like to use a shortened version of their name (as so many of us do), and those who use something that is so detached from their birth name that it can only be accurately described as an alias.

It's surprising (and encouraging) to discover how much data we can already mine from existing systems, including university identity management systems, publisher databases and Libraries Australia (the national bibliographic database).

Fortunately for the NicNames team, academics lead very public lives.