Kuali Foundation aggregator

Kuali.org News: Call for Partners on Kuali IT Support Project

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:06:39 -0500

Posted:

Mar 03, 2010

Indiana University and the University of Hawaii are inviting partners to join them to develop Kuali IT Support, a new incubation project envisioned to offer a set of components that will provide more effective solutions for IT support in higher education while significantly lower costs and increasing capacity. The first phase of this project will focus on building a knowledge management system (KMS), which leverages IU’s award-winning Knowledge Base (http://kb.iu.edu) and extends it into a next-generation collaborative system that shares not only code, but also content among institutions. The KMS will leverage the deep understanding that the project’s partners have about their own institutions’ services, and deliver that expert information in the exact form and format that their communities need.

Future phases of this open community development project will focus on additional modules for online support and may address services such as online software distribution, IT systems status notifications, IT facility management, service desk ticketing and integration, and network access management.

Additionally, the partners believe delivering support to the higher education community through this endeavor could eventually lead to use beyond information management and into disciplines other than IT support.

To find out more about this opportunity, see http://kb.iu.edu/data/azgk.html and contact Sue Workman at sbworkma@indiana.edu.

Kuali.org News: Florida State University Announcement

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:17:06 -0500

Posted:

Feb 26, 2010

The Kuali Community would like to share the following announcement, prepared by Florida State University.

Florida State University (FSU) signed on as a Founder of the Kuali Student System (KS) project in July 2007. We joined the consortium because the functional vision underlying the KS initiative is the right one for FSU and for higher education more broadly.

During the last year or so, the global financial crisis has had a profound effect on the state of Florida, resulting in massive funding cuts to FSU. We are now faced with budget reductions that compel us to focus our scarce resources on sustaining the operational base of our university’s information systems. The financial capacity to continue contributing to Kuali Student has vanished. Regrettably, we have no alternative but to withdraw our participation in the KS initiative, effective June 2010.

We will continue to follow the Kuali Student project and wish the KS team every possible success. FSU looks forward to the possibility of adopting one or more modules of the system in the future.

Kuali.org News: Kuali Projects Release Point-Versions of Software

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:33:02 -0500

Posted:

Feb 09, 2010

The Kuali Financial System (KFS) version 3.0.1 was released last week, along with a new point-release of Rice, version 1.0.1.1. This KFS release is the first patch since KFS 3.0 was made available last fall, and demonstrates the project’s ability not only to build enterprise software, but also to sustain it in support of a growing community of adopters.

The KFS 3.0.1 patch release consists of performance enhancements and modifications to the data dictionary, and addresses several reported issues.

The highlights of the Kuali Rice 1.0.1.1 release include:

New KIM Service methods to support KFS access security
KSB Performance Enhancements
KEW Thin Client Enhancements
Numerous bug fixes

The new versions of KFS and Rice, as well as the links to the release notes and documentation, are available on the kuali.org website: http://kuali.org/download-form

Kuali.org News: IU awarded $2.38 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop library software

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:52:28 -0500

Posted:

Jan 11, 2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A $2.38 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University will be used to develop software created specifically for the management of print and electronic collections for academic and research libraries around the world.

IU will lead the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project, a partnership of research libraries dedicated to managing increasingly digital resources and collections. Together, these libraries will develop "community source" software that will be made available to libraries worldwide.Kuali OLE (pronounced Oh-LAY) partners include Indiana University; Florida Consortium (University of Florida representing Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida and the Florida Center for Library Automation); Lehigh University; Triangle Research Libraries Network (represented by Duke University and North Carolina State University); University of Chicago; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; and the University of Pennsylvania.

Large academic research libraries such as these manage and provide access to millions of items, using software to track interrelated transactions that range from ordering and paying for items to loaning materials to library patrons.

As the nature of library collections expands to include more digital materials -- including leased electronic journals and digitized photograph collections -- libraries are increasingly interested in developing management software for these resources, said Interim Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Carolyn Walters.

"Libraries now create, lease and share digital materials, but the systems in place for cataloging and tracking these items are based on print collections," said Walters. "With this project, we benefit from working together with a community of academic libraries that want to change the way that information is managed in the scholarly environment."

"Research libraries are in dire need of systems that can support the management of research collections for the next-generation scholar," said Robert H. McDonald, executive director for the project and IU's associate dean for library technologies. "This approach demonstrates the best of open-source software development, directed partnership resource needs, and a market of commercial support providers to truly align with the needs of research libraries within the higher education environment."

More than 200 libraries, educational institutions, professional organizations and businesses laid the groundwork for the Kuali OLE project by participating in the original OLE project, a design phase that was supported by an earlier grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by Duke University.Kuali OLE project researchers will now work to create a next-generation library system that breaks away from print-based workflows and reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work.

OLE became an official project of the Kuali Foundation in November. Kuali is a community of universities, colleges, businesses and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain community-source software for higher education. This affiliation gives Kuali OLE tremendous expertise in developing and sustaining community-based software.

"The Mellon Foundation has a distinguished history of supporting transformative projects for education and cultural preservation," said Brad Wheeler, Kuali Foundation board chair and vice president for information technology at IU. "We are grateful for their support of this open, extensible and deeply collaborative work among the OLE investing libraries. The libraries' choice to anchor the project in the Kuali Foundation will ensure its quality, openness and sustainability for years to come."

"The Kuali OLE collaboration comes at the perfect time," said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke University. "If libraries are to provide excellent support for scholarship and teaching well into the future, we must develop a new model that reflects the true needs of our organizations and facilitates our work in a constantly changing environment. This partnership capitalizes on the experience, the commitment and the energy of a key group of institutions to build that model for the future of research library operations. We are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for recognizing the promise of the OLE project, and to Kuali for offering us this opportunity to align our goals with theirs.

"Jakubs and Wheeler were recently elected co-chairs of the Kuali OLE Board of Directors at its initial board meeting in Washington, D.C., on December 16, 2009.

An accomplished team of librarians select, manage and grow Indiana University's research collections, which include more than 6.6 million books and materials in more than 350 languages. The materials support every academic discipline on campus, with an emphasis in the humanities and social sciences. Collections also include journals, maps, films and sound recordings. Users can access more than 692 databases, 60,315 electronic journals, and 816,255 electronic books, as well as locally developed digital content.

Kuali.org News: Kuali Foundation Board Comments on Changes at the Mellon Foundation

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:55:11 -0500

Posted:

Jan 08, 2010

As many of you have read, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has merged its Research in Information Technology (RIT) program into the Scholarly Communications program (to be renamed) led by program officer Don Waters. This change at the Mellon Foundation has prompted some questions and considerable misinformation regarding its effect on Kuali Projects. Thus, the Foundation Board wishes to convey the following points:

Higher Education would have been considerably slower in learning how to pool our resources, synchronize our needs, and develop enterprise-grade software without the timely investments of the Mellon Foundation during the RIT program’s ten years. The Mellon brand and seed capital – always a minor investor relative to the scale of institutional investments – was catalytic in creating the Community Source model of institutional investment and commercial support. For this, the many participants in Kuali projects are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation and the work of Ira Fuchs, Chris Mackie, Don Waters, and others over the years.
Every Kuali project was chartered to be fully self-sustaining without reliance on further investment from any foundation. That remains true today.
By example, the Kuali Financial System finished its 2005 Mellon grant in 2008. KFS Release 3 was completed by member investments, and KFS is now operating under its sustaining charter and investing members. Kuali Rice has always and only been member funded.
All existing Mellon grants to the development stages of Kuali Student, Kuali Coeus, and Kuali Open Library Environment will continue without change in cooperation with the expanded portfolio of Don Waters. Don funded the 2005 Licensing and Policy Summit that architected the licensing and contributor agreements now used by many community source projects including Kuali.
Consistent with the Mellon Foundation’s priorities and recent grants, we anticipate that there will be other IT-related opportunities that focus on the core issues of research, education, and scholarly communications in the future.

Foundations strategically target their investments to areas where their role can be transformative rather than create needs for unending support. We believe that creating/proving the Community Source model – and Kuali projects in particular – exemplify how the decade of Mellon RIT investment achieved its transformative goal. From these lessons, higher education is able to incubate new projects and sustain its existing ones through our own means as that was always a wise requirement from the beginning.

The Kuali Foundation Board of Directors

Kuali.org News: Kuali Welcomes New Quality Assurance Director

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:03:20 -0500

Posted:

Jan 05, 2010

Kuali is excited to welcome Jessica Coltrin as the new Kuali Quality Assurance Director. Jessica started in this new role yesterday, January 4th, 2010. In this position, Jessica will be working with the entire Kuali community on expanding and honing our QA activities. As Kuali matures and begins to embrace code contributions from a variety of members and non-members, it is critical that we ensure protection of the Kuali brand. This “quality” for our brand takes on many perspectives including the code itself, performance, accessibility, licensing, documentation, version control, etc.

Jessica brings a sound background in systems development and QA oversight and has worked in various roles in all phases of the software development life cycle. She has experience with educational institutions and software development companies, having worked at both detail systems development, testing, and management. She comes to us from The University of Arizona, so she will fit well with the new and evolving Kuali team which also includes Zach and Farooq at The U of A. Not only does Jessica have a sound technical background, but she also brings excellent organizational and communication skills.

Jessica's new Kuali email ID is jessica@kuali.org and she will be in touch with many of you to start on this endeavor. Please join us in welcoming Jessica to our Kuali community!