Government exercises – We’ve been busy!

The Research Support Team have worked hard on two Federal Government exercises – HERDC & ERA

HERDC

The Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) is based on research publications that were published in the previous year.  The collection of these publications commences in the faculties and culminates in all University outputs being delivered in hardcopy to IS Research Support with a completion date of 30 June for all reporting to DIISR.  

In April this year IS welcomed Dianne Monnier to the team and she took on the job of HERDC verification and data entry with enthusiasm as the record number of submissions arrived on her desk.  Dianne’s work does not stop with building up impressive piles of research papers, but continues as she enters the bibliographic details into e-publications@bond giving Bond University research output data an even greater reach into the global community. 

ERA

Information Services has provided support for Bond’s submission to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative.  ERA is an evaluative program of the Australian Government via the Australian Research Council.  It aims to assess research quality within Australia’s higher education institutions using a combination of indicators and expert review. 

The Information Services Research Support team worked very closely with Faculty Research Coordinators, the Office of Research Services (ORS) and the Project Management Office (PMO) to collate and process the publication data gathered for this exercise over many weeks.  

In particular the month of May was very demanding with the data being received from the faculties, processed and reformatted and sent onto PMO for upload into the University’s new data management system Research Master.   As well as becoming a RefWorks guru during this exercise Kendall Kousek expertly took on the complex task of checking, sorting and cleansing the data as it arrived at IS and achieved the high quality of data required for the next stage.

Of course uploading the data to the repository is a mandatory step in the ERA exercise and the multiple batch loading was efficiently completed by Lisa Barker whose technical skills are much appreciated.  This proficient teamwork enabled IS to deliver a high standard of data to PMO and ORS on schedule.  

 ‘Thank you’ to everyone in the Research Support team for a job well done on both collection exercises over the last few months.

The following chart gives an indication of the mix of the repository’s 4,339 unique items as at the end of July 2010.