Who owns faculty data?: Fairness and transparency in UCLA's new academic HR system

Reynolds, Chloe; Small, Heather

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/73436 Copy

Description

Title

Who owns faculty data?: Fairness and transparency in UCLA's new academic HR system

Author(s)

• Reynolds, Chloe
• Small, Heather

Issue Date

2015-03-15

Keyword(s)

• information policy and open access
• information organization and metadata
• information/computing ethics

Abstract

Starting in 2015, Opus will be the information system of record for faculty at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Opus will serve as both a profile system, storing data about faculty work, and as workflow engine for the promotion and tenure process. Opus leverages institutional master data wherever possible to collect data about faculty activity. Repurposing institutional data collected for purposes not related to academic review necessitates allowing data subjects, faculty, to contextualize the data for the review process. Displaying and storing these augmented records (master data with manually added metadata from “non-authoritative” sources) has forced to project team to grapple with questions regarding fairness and transparency to both data subjects and to data consumers. How can we hold to “good design” and usability practices, while faithfully representing the inherent “messiness” of the data? How does the context in which the data was collected impact repurposing the data for academic review? This paper outlines our attempts to address these questions, noting the trade-offs and limitations of the selected solutions.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2015 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

English

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/73436

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 is held by the authors. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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