SIMS/EIRG researchers have had outstanding success in the Australian Research Council and Monash Research Fund arenas recently. Major projects to commence in 2002 are:

• Improving Meteorological Forecasting Practice with Knowledge Management Systems
• An Intelligent, User-Sensitive Portal to Breast Cancer Knowledge Online
• Mobile Commerce
• Community Networking: Foundations for Applied Research and Development

What are the features which contribute to an attractive and usable electronic information resource? Dr Kirsty Williamson and Associate Professor Frada Burstein have now completed research based around this question in a project funded by the Australian Research Council and the State Library of Victoria.

The research has resulted in:

• an evaluation methodology and multicriteria criteria evaluation tool which incorporates both qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods
• a set of recommendations to publishers about resource use measurement
  
• extensive recommendations to improve access to electronic library resources

More information about this research project and its outcomes is available at http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/itnr/

EIRG has now completed this major research program funded in 2000 and 2001 through the Strategic Monash University Research Fund. The program's goals were to establish enterprise knowledge management as a research strength for Monash University and to put in place a sustainable research infrastructure, goals which have been fully realised. Specific achievements include:

• establishing the Virtual Knowledge Management Laboratory. With sponsorship from Xerox, Tower Software and the German National Research Centre for Information Technology and humanIT GmbH, the KM Lab is a flexible, state-of-the-art facility for enterprise knowledge management research and teaching.
• an excellent outcome in the Australian Research Council competitive grants arena. (See Recent Grants Successes).
• a major Healthcare Knowledge Management Research initiative in collaboration with Colwell-Sacerdoti and Hewlett Packard
• the emergence of community networking and mobile commerce as rapidly growing areas of research strength for Monash University
• the establishment of three new EIRG affiliated research programs: the Centre for Community Networking Research, Information Systems Development Research and Information Systems Management and E-Business Research
• sponsorship of the Australian Conference on Knowledge Management and Intelligent Decision Support in 2000 and again in 2001

Standards Australia's Committee IT/21 has adopted the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema (RKMS) for development into a framework Australian standard for recordkeeping metadata.

The RKMS was developed in 1998-99 by SIMS/EIRG researchers (led by Professor Sue McKemmish) in collaboration with industry partners the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, National Archives of Australia, the State Records Authority of NSW, the Queensland State Archives, the Records Management Association of Australia and the Australian Council of Archives. It was funded by an Australian Research Council grant and industry partners.

For more information about the RKMS see http://rcrg.dstc.edu.au/research/spirt/deliverables.html

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