Blog

• Aaron, Aron, Richard, and Rick held initial BRC Service Design interviews re: Cloud and Virtual Workstation services. Staff from D-Lab and SCF were interviewed.
• Aaron, Aron, Patrick, and Richard attended DockerCon 2014.
• Posters developed and shipped to the printer for the 6/25/2014 OneIT summit
• RIT Reading group on 2014-06-19 Data publication as a means to document and share research
• Various communication work: BRC Launch article; RIT home page slideshow describing unit's work at a high level; etc.
• Emergency Communications Plan partially drafted (v0 draft)

• Met with DHSI attendees to talk about fall follow-up activities
• Kicked off CDL DH research project, to look at DH support across UC schools
• Met with Michael Black about Hack the Hearst hackathon
• Put out a call for editors for the DiRT directory, evaluated applications, and selected editorial board
• DiRT directory logo is currently being redesigned

• Raymond Yee facilitated an RIT Reading Group meeting on 2014-06-05 Teaching Analysis and Presentation of Open Data on Th 6/5.
• BRC Service Design continues with briefings on and reviews of evolving templates and process; initial interviews are scheduled for F 6/13.
• RIT's presentations at the One IT Summit on W 25 June will include a BRC BoF and poster, as well as posters for Digital Humanities and Research Data Management.
• As permissions arrive (from faculty presenters to use video of their presentations) and time permits, we're updating the BRC web site with text and materials from the BRC Launch event of 3/22.
• A refresh of RIT's communication plan is in the works, with Quinn, Steve, Aron, and Rick drafting a process and schedule to assure the RIT site is regularly updated with news that communicates the unit's engagement with and support of researchers on the campus.

• The BRC Program was launched on 5/22. The event went off very well, and over the coming weeks we'll have news items as well as incorporation of graphics, the BRC Program handout, and video from the event in the RIT web site.
• RIT staff hosted Brian Waechter (newly hired L&S Director of IT) for exchange and exploration of how we might support and collaborate with L&S IT, on Monday 5/12.
• A working meeting on BRC as it intersects with the D-Lab's work was held on Wednesday 5/14, Patrick participating. A meeting with Kimmen Sjolander was attended by a number of RIT-AD staff, including the Gary Jung and some of his HPC team.
• BRC Service Design work – both development of a process and execution of that process in iterative steps – continues. Aaron, Richard, and Steve are involved. Update and solicitation of feedback is scheduled for the RIT-AD team meeting of Tu 5/27.
• A reading group on 2014-05-21 The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Research Computing was held on W 5/21. Mark Chiang and a contingent from RAC attended.
• RIT staff attended a number of end-of-year events, including for the DH Working Group and D-Lab.

• David and Jenn facilitated a follow-up RAE Briefing with the Council of Humanities and Social Sciences Deans, on Wednesday 5/7
• An RAE briefing was given to EVCP Claude Steele and VC for Administration & Finance John Wilton last month (April)

• BRT Launch invitations went out on W 4/30 for the event scheduled for 5/22 3pm, Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall. Work is underway for event logistics, speaker coordination, etc. Patrick will present an introduction/overview to the BRC Program, and is consulting with Steve, Richard, and Aaron to develop that brief talk and presentation materials. 
• A process for BRC Program Service Design is under construction, with Richard, Aaron, and Steve drafting a proposal following discussion with Patrick and Chris.
• Patrick gave a report-back from the CASC meeting he attended, and the 5/7 reading group on managing restricted or sensitive research data focused on a special topic of that meeting's agenda.
• Discussion of a "condo model" for storage is underway, including Patrick, Gary, and Jack Schnell; and of RDM strategies and opportunities including Chris and Harrison Dekker.
• Quinn and Steve are coordinating with the CIO's communication team to open proper links and channels between the CIO's web site and RIT's site.
• Most of the RIT-AD team, as well as Chris, attended this year's DataEdge conference on Th/F 8-9 May.

• Organized and held #HackFSM, a hackathon around the Free Speech Movement digital archive
  • NewsCenter article about the hackathon made the front page of berkeley.edu
  • The winning entry has been widely linked to, including from the "On The Same Page" website

• Participated in DH working group meeting on whether DH is "radical"
• Participated in Humanities 2.0 event out of Art History
• Participated in Day of DH; DH at Berkeley site included Cindy's round-up of the day's activities
• Attended DH workshop put on by Digital History Coordinator
• Attended Jan Brueghel launch party
• Attended HSSA panel on digital humanities
• Attended DH working group meeting with presentation by CDL about relevant services
• Will be working with Barbara Hui (CDL), Catherine Mitchell (CDL) and Miriam Posner (UCLA) to research DH support across UC system, and potential role for CDL

• A launch event is set for the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) Program: Th 22 May, 3-5 pm at in Sutardja Dai Hall. Please mark your calendars; invitations are expected to go out to the campus during the week of 28 April.
• Aaron Culich began working for RIT on 21 April in his new, dual IT Architect role: Cloud Computing Service Architect and Consulting Services Solutions Architect. Welcome to Aaron!
• Patrick attended the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing (CASC) spring meeting in Arlington, VA [agenda (PDF)]. He will report back on the meeting to his team on Tuesday 4/29, and a reading group session focusing on one of the key CASC topics – management of restricted data – is scheduled for Weds. 7 May during the noon hour.
• Work continued in preparing the data center for the BRC institutional/condo cluster (power, cooling, racks, nodes).

On March 19, 2014, staff in the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive began using an instance of CollectionSpace to manage their CineFiles collection.  CineFiles is a collection of scanned images and curated metadata from press reviews, newspaper articles, press kits and other documents describing films and cinema more broadly.  According to the primary managers of this collection, the move to CollectionSpace has been very successful and has allowed them to streamline their operations considerably.

The CineFiles collection is curated by professional librarians and comprises these dimensions:
- 56K documents
- 134K page images
- 31K films
- 19K subjects and genres
- 37K persons
- 8K organizations

The public portal to the CineFiles collection is currently being refactored to use a snapshot of data and images managed in CollectionSpace.

The core SaaS (software as a service) related development work on CollectionSpace 4.1 is complete.  We'll now wait for LYRASIS to hire its new development team before performing any additional development on the 4.1 release.  Our goal is to work with LYRASIS to wrap up development on the 4.1 release and to perform a full release process with them. We believe this will be a great way for the new LYRASIS team to become familiar with some of the CollectionSpace source code and to learn about the CollectoinSpace release lifecycle.

For more detailed information about CollectionSpace 4.1, please see the release notes.

• RAE consultation with Council of Humanities and Social Science Deans is proceeding, with packets of materials (slide deck, 1-page summaries of services areas) sent out to the Deans. A survey of faculty in these departments is in progress, aimed at assembling responses that will facilitate further strategic planning discussion at the May meeting of the COHSSD.
• RAE presentation to John Wilton and Claude Steele is scheduled for next week.

• Work proceeds preparing the Data Center for instantiation of BRC's institutional/condo cluster: power, cooling, racks, and nodes are ordered and beginning to arrive / be installed
• BRC service lead Gary Jung and RIT leadership met with Eric Fraser (EECS) and Nuclear Engineering Profs. Miassimiliano Fratoni and Rachel Slaybaugh re: NE researchers' interest in contributing to and using the BRC Institutional/Condo cluster
• RIT Reading Group on Virtualization (notes) on 4/10, with representation from D-Lab, ETS, Econometrics/Statistics, IST-EIS, and RIT
• The first LBL-BRC / RIT-AD joint team meeting took place on Friday 4/11

• Preparations continue for digital humanities hackathon, in partnership with the Library
  • Event funding from Office of the Dean of Humanities, Library, Research IT, History Department
  • API completed and documented
  • Event website and Facebook event launched
  • Widespread event promotion on campus (through emails, posters)
  • Mentors recruited both from within Berkeley and nearby tech companies
  • 40 registrants before the kick-off
• Digital Humanities Council is developing a proposal for a campus digital humanities program
• Kick-off meeting for CUNY / DiRT development project (to integrate DiRT with Commons-in-a-Box and DHCommons)
• Presented DiRT at sociology grad students' working group; a number of participants were particularly interested in exploring how they might use Berkeley Prosopography Services
• Working with Ted Peña and his assistants on developing data model for his lab's website
• Met with Hugh Richmond about archiving the existing Shakespeare's Staging site, and how to proceed with site re-build in Drupal
• Presented on Views "recipes" at BDUG meeting

• Patrick Schmitz and David Greenbaum met with faculty and staff stakeholders from EECS, Statistics, History, ETS, et al. for discussion of cloud services for instructional computing. This is an aspect of the BRC program for which RIT staffing recruitment is in-progress (IT Architect 4, cf. listing #17548 at http://jobs.berkeley.edu).
• Logistics, preparation of the Data Center, and purchasing continues to progress toward launch of Berkeley's institutional/condo cluster – the first service expected to roll out of the Berkeley Research Computing program.
• John Deck and Eric Kansa presented and facilitiated a lively and well-attended reading group meeting on Linked Open Data in archaeology and biology

• Educause will offer a half-day seminar, Plan for the Future of Research and Teaching Technologies with Peer Benchmarks, on Monday, September 29, 2014 from 8:00 to 11:30 AM. David and/or Jenn, and perhaps a member of the NYU team who pioneered RAE methodology, will present/facilitiate.