EUNIS News

                                                                        December 2003

New opportunities for membership of EUNIS

On 2 July 2003 the EUNIS General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to make major changes to the organisation’s Statutes.  The most important change is in the concept of Member. Previously each country of Europe was entitled to be a member of EUNIS. Now, membership has been radically extended to allow individual higher education institutions within Europe to become members too. There will be a small annual subscription. Members will be entitled to nominate a representative on the EUNIS General Assembly. Representatives will be eligible to stand for election to the Council and Board of Directors, and to vote in such elections. Members will also be entitled to significant reductions in registration fees for EUNIS events.

The new Statutes are avilable on the Web site.

Details of how to join EUNIS will be announced shortly.

EUNIS2003, Amsterdam, July 2003

The University of Amsterdam, with support from the SURF Foundation, hosted the 9th EUNIS Conference in The Netherlands on 3-4 July 2003. The Conference theme was “Beyond the Network: Innovative IT Services”. It was well-attended by more than 350 delegates from 32 countries in 4 continents.

It is now customary for the conference to be preceded by a series of seminars. These took place on 2 July, attended by 68 persons. There followed two packed days of presentations, starting with a welcome from Dr Noorda, President of the University of Amsterdam in the beautiful old Auditorium of the University and concluding with a canal trip to the equally impressive West India House for the Conference Dinner. Keynote speakers at the conference were John Gage (SUN Microsystems), Tony Hey (eScience programme UK), Michael Zastrocky (Gartner) and Brian Hawkins (Educause). In addition there were more than 100 papers presented.

The €1000 Award for Best Presentation at EUNIS2003 was won by Elsa Cardoso from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. Elsa’s presentation slides are available on the EUNIS2003 website at http://www2.ic.uva.nl/eunis2003/ Click on ‘The presentations of the papers in six sessions’ then click on ‘Session 5’, then the title of E.Cardoso’s paper.

Many thanks to the members of the Organisation and Programme Committees (Marij Veugelers, Petra Smulders, Hans Dijkman, Bas Cordewener and Kurt de Belder) for all the efforts they made to ensure EUNIS2003 was a great success. Their hard work was greatly appreciated by delegates who sent many messages of thanks after the conference.

Copies of the printed proceedings of EUNIS2003, and a CD-ROM are still available. For details see http://www2.ic.uva.nl/eunis2003/. There are also links to several comprehensive photographic records of the Conference from this web page.

Award for Excellence 2003

The winner of the 2003 EUNIS Elite Award for Excellence was announced at the EUNIS2003 Conference in Amsterdam.

The €2000 prize was awarded to the Graz University of Technology, Austria for their TUGonline Project creating an all-embracing campus-wide information management system. The Award was collected by Franz Haselbacher, Head of the Department of Information Management.

The winning submission is avialable in the Best practices section of the Web site

Early notice is given that there will again be a EUNIS Award for Excellence in 2004. Full details are not available yet but the rules will be similar to those for the 2003 award. See ‘Member Services’ page at http://www.eunis.org.

EUNIS2004, Bled, Ljubljana, 2004 - CALL FOR PAPERS

The 10th International Conference of European University Information Systems will be held in Bled, near Ljubljana, Slovenia from 29 June to 2 July 2004.

A Call For Papers on the following themes has been issued:

  • E-learning in higher education
  • Integrated information systems, design, and middleware
  • IT governance, information management, and decision support systems
  • IT infrastructures and grid computing
  • Security and privacy
  • E-library: media and content

EUNIS seminar, Paris, November 2003:

“University Information Systems Strategy and Policy”

In collaboration with the European University Association, the Conference des Presidents d’Universite (France) and UniversitiesUK, and with generous financial support from SCT and SUN Microsystems, EUNIS arranged this seminar to give heads of universities the opportunity to share and learn about best practice in defining strategy and policy for Information Technology.

46 university leaders from 20 countries registered to attend the seminar, together with 26 EUNIS General Assembly members. Speakers included Ken Edwards (UK), Michael Zastrocky (USA), Tim O’Shea (UK), Benoit Sillard (France), Mathew Boice (SCT), Les Watson (UK), John Slater (UK), Hellmuth Broda (SUN), Jean-Pierre Finance (France), Francois Tavenas (Canada), Gilbert Bereziat (France), and Bas Cordewener (Netherlands). There was also a breakfast round table discussion session. Attendees reported the seminar was a great success and hope to see it repeated at a future date.

A report of the breakfast discussion, slide presentations and videos are available on the EUNIS web site at http://www.eunis.org

"Latest edition of ‘Informatica"

A special edition of Informatica: An International Journal of Computing and Informatics published in Slovenia appeared in December 2003. This contains thirteen papers selected from the last two EUNIS Conferences in Porto and Amsterdam, selected in collaboration with Professor Matjaz Gams, Executive Associate Editor. The papers have been chosen from the five areas of e-Learning in Higher Education (3 papers), University Information Systems (2), Information Management and Decision Support Systems (3), e-Libraries (3) and IT Infrastructures (2). The authors come from Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and the United Kingdom.

For more information about Informatica see http://ai.ijs.si/informatica/

e-Learning activities

Andrew Rothery ( UK), Jens Doerup (Denmark) and Bas Cordewener (Netherlands) will be holding a EUNIS workshop on the use of e-learning in universities across Europe. This will take place in Oxford, UK in February 2004.