Staffing & Training

Staff Resources
One of PHSU's main strengths is its staff resources. With librarians and library staff who have extensive experience in metadata support in addition to building, developing, and manipulating databases and content management systems, PHSU has an excellent foundation upon which to build its DAMs. With the need to have extensive implementation, training, and IT support, particularly for the OSS DAM Omero, staff with specialized skills are particularly necessary.

The Ontology Development Group of PHSU, as a group fundamentally concerned with classifying information in a knowedgebase, has an important seat at the table for staff training and use of this tool. The majority of federal, state, and other government funded medical research often require at least a measure off public accessibility written into its funding. As this group is particularly preoccupied with the security, management, and cataloging of medical research, their input is invaluable.

Training Needs
The specialties and expertise already present at PHSU will make implementing our chosen DAMs much easier in terms of turn around time from selecting the technology to training, the stages of implementation, and evaluation. Having metadata specialist, archivist, and ontology experts lends itself to creating an atmosphere of both creativity, troubleshooting, and solid support; the Content Management product will allow for structure and malleability in terms of archiving while the OSS nature of Omero provides the flexibility to make these two tools interoperable with our current systems.

All the same, Records Manager boasts robust customer support in terms of training, IT support, and implementation. With these support systems in place, PHSU has created a timeline for expected implementation, with room for extended bouts of training should extra time become necessary.

From the Omero side, an OS product typically calls for a greater amount of time, effort, and work to be done. Be it through, extensive code and content development and modification to meet the needs of our particular institution, or troubleshooting from the open forums and code of other case studies, this DAM will likely require more effort to fit our parameters and specifications.

Vendor Resources
Records Manager, as a popular and widely-used product, comes with training materials and resources to aid the consumer in managing and creating the DAM. As mentioned above, due to the open source nature of Omero, this product, while also used by a variety of companies and institution, has fewer supports from the Microscopy; the majority of the training materials are PDFs, whitepapers, and extensions created and produced by the myriad of consumers.

Training Plan
PHSU has a timeline plan at this time that reflects the two prong nature of the DAMs implementation.

The first DAM to be integrated into our system will be Records Manager, with Omero to follow. Doing the integrations in this manner will allow the Records Manager, as a non-OS product, to receive the full breath of support, training, and implementation timeline as promised by HP. Allowing Omero as an open source product to better mold to the more rigid structure of Records Manger.

In order to complete this process, PHSU has created a timeline of training and support to be carried out over the next year to 1 1/2 year. In this time, staff will be granted an initial training period of 6 weeks. Should the time prove to be insufficient to meet the requirements, additional time will be allotted to make the staff fully comfortable. Once optimal conditions have been reached by all pertinent staff and faculty, the products will officially go 'online'. As these products are field tested and utilized more fully, PHSU fully expects debugging and regular evaluation and feedback to occur on all levels of participation.