Membership Meetings
The aim of the biannual membership meetings is to involve the members actively in the euroCRIS actions and projects. The core of the work is done in the euroCRIS Task Groups. In separate parallel sessions, which are open for all euroCRIS members, the Task Groups discuss their workplans and progress: these are an ideal platform for interaction and exchange of ideas. In plenary sessions the Board and the Task Groups report from their meetings. In this way all participants get a full survey of all ongoing activities and of the action plan for the next six months.
The membership meetings are organised each time in another country and have also mutual promotional value, both from euroCRIS and the national and regional CRIS Communities. Mostly half a day is devoted to presentations and discussions of national/regional developments. On the request of the organising euroCRIS member courses will be organised.
Membership meeting in St. Andrews, 11-13 November 2009
This was again a very successful event. Over the three days 62 (!) people attended the meetings: 36 euroCRIS members, 21 representatives form Scottish universities and 5 representatives from Cranfield University, England.
Half of the audience attended for the first time a euroCRIS membership meeting. For them the euroCRIS overview session, the reports from the Task Groups and the CERIF tutorial are a useful "crash course" to get acquainted with the ins and outs of our association.
The second day with the Scottish session and the euroCRIS Jostein Hauge session brought a lot of news from the local and euroCRIS communities: university and national CRIS, institutional repositories and their connection with CRIS, local projects and the national British Ready4REF topic.
Topic of the 3rd day was Benefits and problems of CERIF-CRIS implementations. A working implementation was demonstrated and ideas for a new Task Group on CRIS Architecture & Development were discussed.
The programme and presentations are available on: http://www.eurocris.org/members/members-area/membership-meetings/ .
Meetings in 2010
- Associated with our biennial conferences a brief preconference business meeting has been held in Aalborg on the 2nd of June 2010. Main items were the demonstration of the prototype of the new website and the presentation of the first results of the survey on the new Task Group CRIS Architecture and Development.
- The next full regular membership meeting is scheduled on the 8th and 9th of November 2010 in Prague, Czech Republic. Venue is the conference room of Hotel Expo. The draft programme is currently being discussed. It comprises a CERIF tutorial, a euroCRIS overview session and sessions with Czech and Slovak speakers and euroCRIS members presenting CRIS advancements, challenges and problems for discussion. Also a thematic session on Research Assessment with position papers and discussion is planned. The organisers have created a website for the event: http://eurocris.infoscience.cz/. More information will follow soon.