SOFTWARE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
The Office of Instructional and Research Technology (OIRT) tracks
departmental interest and usage of major academic and research software
packages. We have recently developed a process by which faculty and staff
can submit requests to review licensing arrangements for specific
software. The primary goal of this process is to work with departments,
identify common interests, and combine purchasing power to reduce costs
and improve software availability.
General Process
Just as the Rutgers University Libraries use information gathered
from faculty - librarian liaison relationships are used to develop their
collections - we are inviting faculty liaisons and departmental IT staff to work
with OIRT to develop a software collection well suited to our academic and
research goals. As likely software contenders are identified, our goal will be to
match our combined interests, potential needs, and purchasing power with vendor specific
educational pricing arrangements to make those opportunities available to
the Rutgers community. Since there is no budget for this effort, our role
at OIRT is to identify the best approach when the combined interest is
sufficient enough to improve pricing.
Recent successes include
- MSSG and OIRT worked together to bring the Stata statistical package to the Rutgers community by making it available at the http://software.rutgers.edu web site. Stata is now available for office use, home use, or student usage at pricing that is significantly reduced.
- Census Seat, which provides access to the Census microdata, is a combined effort by 8 departments sharing in the expense so that all of them can share access to the micro data described at http://ces.census.gov/
- A small group of departments has combined their purchasing power to make Maple and ChemDraw available for free. These packages are available thru the Rutgers software portal at http://software.rutgers.edu/ Maple is available to faculty and staff as well as for use in computing labs while ChemDraw is available to students, faculty, and staff.
- Other packages in various stages of review include Endnote or RefWorks, and MatLab, with more to be posted to the liaison mail lists.
Identify Faculty IT Liaisons
The first step in this process is to identify faculty IT liaisons from
each department/unit. The role of the faculty IT liaison would be to serve
as the departmental point of contact between both OIRT and the respective
department. Initially, the faculty IT liaison would:
- identify academic and research software usage and needs within their respective department/unit
- alert OIRT to packages that they would like to have reviewed for licensing
- participate in assessing the utility of packages (within their respective department/unit) as requested by other faculty IT liaisons
- alert OIRT to current site-licensed packages that are no longer required.
Join Faculty Liaisons By...
Sending an email to oirt@rutgers.edu
The goal is to have 100% participation across all campus departments so that the process of site-licensing is as inclusive as possible. Our combined purchasing power can bring significant benefit to the university community. For more information, please feel free to contact OIRT at oirt@rutgers.edu or by phone at 732/445-1438.