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SLU news
Results from the review of the Tilda project
Published: 21 December 2018
A report on the review of the Tilda project by the consulting agency Knowit has recently been presented to the system owners and Tilda project group members. The agency recommends a restart of the project wherein the goals are re-examined and explicated to verify that the requirements on an IT system for archiving and publishing research data are correctly put. The following step will then be to find system(s) that correspond to the set goals.
The recommendation presented in the report is to use existing IT systems, either developed by external agents or commercially available. A solution combining SLU systems already in use with other currently available systems is presented, but before a decision is made further analysis of the requirements must be carried out.
The current demand for system support for archiving and publishing research data at SLU is high. The knowledge and experience required for this task has to a large extent been acquired during the project and with the formation of the Data Curation Unit the user part of the developing organisation is evident. Taken together, this will partly help alleviate the weaknesses in the project that are illustrated in the report, such as insufficient consensus concerning the objectives and insufficient understanding of the principles of electronic archiving. At the same time it will provide prerequisites for clear communication with all parties concerned.
Other areas of the project have also been found to contain weaknesses, e.g. implementation of the project model and the choice of platform for development (open source). The absence of a requirements analyst in the project has led to unclear requirements, misunderstandings and delays. Some of the components that have been developed using open source have proven less suitable for the continued development due to complex, necessary software upgrades.
The Head of University Administration, the IT director, the Head of the Vice-Chancellor's Office and the Chief Librarian who together ordered the review of the Tilda project are currently discussing the contents of the report and how to proceed.
Questions concerning the report or its content will be answered by the data curation unit (dcu@slu.se).