Delivering opportunities to your desktop

ERIC SMITH | The Research Grants Office is hoping a new database system will provide McGill academics with more research opportunities and make the process of applying for grants considerably simpler.

The University has bought several modules of a database system by Albany-based company InfoEd called InfOffice.

Some components of this system are already familiar to University researchers. Many use the SPIN Canada database which stores information about grant opportunities available to academics in Canada.

By adding two more components, GENIUS and SMARTS, to SPIN, the system will automatically inform a researcher of a funding opportunity relevant to his or her area of expertise.

Just as SPIN is a database of available grants, GENIUS is a database of academics. SMARTS is the component which matches entries in the two databases and notifies researchers by e-mail.

For the system to work, researchers need to keep their GENIUS entries up to date. GENIUS records contain fields relevant to all aspects of an academic career, including publications and courses taught.

Filling out long and detailed forms, though a time-honoured feature of academic work, is one that is less than inspiring. But an incentive to keeping the GENIUS entry up to date is that all data, once entered, can be instantly packaged to accommodate the requirements of a grant application.

According to Janine Vasseur, director of the Research Grants Office, "Instead of filling out grant application forms and getting them signed by chairs and review boards, researchers can click to e-mail the form to us and all the approvals are done electronically.

"We do everything by e-mail, no one will come and see us," jokes Vasseur. "We'll all get fat."

The Research Grants Office has hired students to enter existing database information on McGill faculty into the GENIUS database. The Office hopes to have everything currently available in the database by the end of the month. But it will be up to individual professors to review their entries and keep them up to date. They do this by getting a password and username from the Office and accessing GENIUS (as well as other InfOffice components) through their web browser.

The system allows professors to identify which parts of their entry should be kept private and which should be publicly available.

Vasseur recognizes that the system doesn't have the same appeal to all members of the faculty. "Some older professors are very negative," she said. "First, they don't want to adapt themselves to the computer. And some are prima donnas, they've got plenty of grant money and students."

But younger faculty have been more keen to register in the system, said Vasseur. "People in Medicine are more gung-ho, but that's because Medicine is more prone to get a lot of hits."

Pierre Bélanger, Vice-Principal (Research) and Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, entered his own profile into the system for a trial run of SMARTS.

"At first I was getting far too much stuff," he said. By listing one of his keywords as "electrical engineering," Bélanger was getting e-mail notification of six or seven grant opportunities a day, many of which had no bearing on his specific area of research.

But once he narrowed his key-words down, matches were more directly targeted to his own research.

Plant Science professor Diane Mather also participated in the trial run. "I didn't work very well," she said. But she added, "With any kind of system like that the keywords are very important so a lot of the information I got wasn't very relevant to me. I think it's a great idea though. I'm willing to try it again."

Bélanger said some of the funding opportunities suggested were ones he would not otherwise have found out about.

"It's a way to bring to our attention agencies we might not have heard of," said Mather, "but in my case, the reason I hadn't heard of them was that they might not have been too relevant to me."

Since the database originates in the U.S., it has information about American funding organizations not usually considered by Canadian researchers. And SMARTS only provides matches for agencies that fund research outside the U.S., so Canadian-based researchers are eligible for all matches found. This could lead to several new grant opportunities for McGill researchers.

"We have done well with NIH (National Institutes of Health) in the U.S.," said Bélanger, "so there's a traditional connection there." But there are several other U.S. funding bodies that Canadian researchers, though eligible, don't often apply for.

According to Vasseur, it was an advantage for McGill to be the first university in Canada to use the system. InfoEd has listings for 600 clients among U.S. institutions and is anxious to expand its market in Canada. That means that it agreed to add features that are particularly valuable for McGill in hopes of attracting more Canadian clients, like automatically generating complete funding profiles required annually by the Quebec government's SIRU (Système d'informatique pour la recherche universitaire).

And once everything is up and running, the system will allow the Research Grants Office to keep track of all proposals at McGill throughout the funding and research process.