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October 2005 Faculty IT Liaisons Newsletter

Upcoming Events and Announcements
• 1) Research Support Symposium (November 9)
• 2) 2005 Census Research Data Center Conference (October 27)
• 3) Supercomputing Seminar (November 16)
• 4) Statistics Support
• 5) UPDATE: Broadband Networks, Internet2, and Clinical Informatics at UMDNJ (November 14)
• 6) UPDATE: Bibliographic Software Review
• ISSUE OF THE MONTH: Unmet Academic Software Needs
• FEEDBACK OR GENERAL Q&A TO OIRT AND PARTNERS

UPCOMING EVENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS (Please be sure to share these events and announcements with your colleagues. For a complete list of upcoming IT events visit http://oirt.rutgers.edu)

Dr. Michael J. Pazzani, the new Vice President for Research and Graduate and Professional Education, will be the keynote speaker at the Research Support Symposium to be held on Wednesday, November 9th. The agenda includes presentations by RUL, ORSP, OIRT, REHS and OIT. Please visit http://oirt.rutgers.edu/registration/register.php?id=1109 to register for the symposium. Please visit http://oirt.rutgers.edu/archives/sym051109.html for more information. Lunch will be provided.

The Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research will host the 2005 Census Research Data Center Conference. Investigators will present papers based on current or recent projects carried out in a Research Data Center using confidential census data. Please visit the conference web site at www.ciser.cornell.edu/NYCRDC/conference_agenda.shtml to register or to review a list of the presentations along with descriptive abstracts of the papers.

OIRT will be conducting a one-hour seminar for faculty and post-docs on how to obtain computing accounts on the NSF's Cyber Infrastructure Partnership (http://www.ci-partnership.org) (aka PACI) supercomputing resources on Wednesday, November 16 at 11AM in Room 196 Davidson Hall. Please register at http://oirt.rutgers.edu/registration/register.php?id=1116 for this event.

Statistical training and resources are available from various Rutgers units. http://oirt.rutgers.edu/res/statistics.html is a consolidated listing of these resources prepared by OIRT.

How Will They Impact Future Practice and Delivery of Health Care, Education and Research? Visit http://informatics.umdnj.edu/iaims/internet2/About.html for more information and registration.

Your feedback via an online survey would be useful. This online survey form will be posted to the http://oirt.rutgers.edu/ web site in the "Upcoming IT Events" section. Both the EndNote and the RefWorks presentations are conferenced across all campuses. RefWorks training has been rescheduled to October 28 at 10am as well as 1:30pm and the trial period has been extended to the end of November. EndNote has a free 30 day trial period for their software which is available from http://endnote.com/ for download. EndNote demo had over 60 attendees on October 12th.

What is your department's unmet software needs? Please list unmet software needs and briefly describe how each would make a difference. Then email your unmet needs to oirt@rutgers.edu. Examples of recent site licensing successes: - ChemDraw - University chemistry departments pooled resources and attained a university-wide site license for the cost of a mere 11 copies if purchased individually. In addition, this site license dramatically changes instruction as students can download the software as well. - Maple - Several university departments participated in purchasing a university site license for this mathematical software package. Thereby simplifying support as free downloads are made available to all faculty and University systems. - Stata - OIRT and MSSG identified a licensing option which greatly reduced prices for students (similar to the cost of a book.) and for faculty. - Census Seat, which provides an opportunity to analyze Census micro data is shared among a set of departments that pooled their resources. Where do things go from here: Whether a site license or reduced pricing makes sense will depend on several factors including: level of interest, vendor distribution options, and pricing. Based on current successes, when prices are right and departments pool their resources for their common good, opportunities can be found. In addition to your listing, we will be asking all computing support staff to provide an inventory of software not currently offered through the http://software.rutgers.edu/ portal. If you prefer, forward your unmet needs to your computing support staff and ask them to include your listing with their listing of the department s software inventory. Packages under consideration so far....

• - N6 or NUD*IST, NVIVO (content analysis) http://www.qsrinternational.com/products/sitelicences/site_licences.htm
• - Atlas TI (content analysis) http://www.atlasti.com/index.php
• - HLM (Hierarchical data modeling) http://www.ssicentral.com/index.html
• - Matlab http://www.mathworks.com/
• - DBMS Copy (format conversion between packages like SAS, SPSS, Oracle, Access, etc.) http://www.dataflux.com/Technology/Products/DBMS/
• - Snap Survey (Survey software) http://snapsurveys.com/
• - Tecplot (plotting program) http://www.tecplot.com/
• - Peopleware (event management) http://www.peopleware.com/
• - ASA Modelmax (data mining application for predictive and descriptive modeling) http://www.asacorp.com/products/mmxover.jsp
• - SAP (for instructional use) http://www.sap.com/index.epx
• - courseGenie (add-on to word to build WebCT or Blackboard, etc) http://www.horizonwimba.com/products/coursegenie/
• - ProEngineer http://www.ptc.com/products/index.htm

We are very interested in gaining your feedback on any technology issue. Feel free to respond to oirt@rutgers.edu or call us at 732-445-1438. Note that questions pertaining more directly to a campus, departmental, or partner IT organization will be coordinated with that unit. An archive of these newsletters can be found at http://oirt.rutgers.edu/cmn/fl-archives.html