Executive Report

FRATS: A data bank of state academic talent

FOR UNIVERSITIES, business and government, these are days of cold facts and hot ideas. Two things much in demand are expertise and money. Expertise to retool the state's industrial base. Money to open up new areas of research while keeping the old ones going. Much of this expertise is ready and waiting in the state's institutions of higher learning; much of that money is available from government and industry. All parties think they have something to gain by communicating better with each other, but as yet there is no one-stop data bank of academic talents from which everyone can draw.

Since 1980, however, an association of Illinois universities has been working on the premise that a statewide computer system with information on past and present research by institutions of higher learning is both desirable and possible. Known as Faculty Research Assistance to the State (FRATS), the association has collected its first batch of faculty "profiles" detailing areas of expertise and is in the process of loading computers with this information. By July 1983, FRATS staff hope to have research profiles of some 5,000 faculty members from five participating campuses on line and easily available to business, government and the universities themselves. Statewide demonstrations for selected governmental and industrial "clients" will be held this spring. A full-scale publicity campaign will begin in July.

The idea of an inventory of university resources is not a new one. In the early 1970s, Sam Gove, director of the University of Illinois' Institute of Government and Public Affairs, chaired a committee on state government and university relations which inventoried the UI faculty and published a report on its findings. The Illinois Board of Higher Education liked the idea and agreed to fund it, provided that the inventory was statewide. At that time, the aim was to expand university involvement with state government. Several state universities, as well as Bradley University in Peoria and the University of Chicago, were involved in the initial discussions of what eventually became the FRATS project, but not all decided to join FRATS.

Today, the focus is on high technology and rebuilding the state's economy. The five campuses which are participating in FRATS are: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Southern Illinois University at both Carbondale and Edwardsville; Eastern Illinois University at Charleston (under the Board of Governors), and Northern Illinois University at DeKalb (under the Board of Regents). Membership is a voluntary campus decision, and so far no Chicago-based or private university is participating in FRATS, though Northwestern University in Evanston has expressed interest in joining in the future.

No one knows the uses the FRATS system will be put to until it actually starts working, but there are a host of possible scenarios: A federal agency wants a consultant to help with a proposal for a research project; a private company is embarking on long-term research and development and needs academic assistance; a firm is looking for someone to fine-tune a product; a municipality needs expert testimony for a legislative hearing; a professor is trying to locate colleagues who could collaborate on a project. All these people could make use of the FRATS system to find the person or the information they want. In addition, universities themselves could use FRATS to get the news out to faculty on opportunities for research and to keep track of their own resources.

"We're networking the tremendous untapped expertise of the state's higher education institutions," says Richard Zollinger, director of the Office of Statewide Faculty Research Resources at UI's Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Zollinger believes FRATS can be an important part of the drive to attract high technology firms and industries to Illinois. He says both the Governor's Commission on Science and High Technology and Mayor Jane Byrne's Task Force on High Technology Development are interested. He also sees FRATS as being useful to state and local government, enabling them "to tap resources they don't even know exist." And according to Norm Peterson, executive director of the governor's commission, "It's of great advantage for universities to buy into the system. FRATS feeds the universities information on opportunities for their faculty."

How does FRATS work? Essentially, information about faculty research activities is collected by the member universities and stored in an on-line computerized data bank. A FRATS public "profile" of a faculty member includes the following information:

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name, campus address and phone, academic rank, department, professional identification, publications, and current research objectives. Other items available to each campus may include: grants, public service activities, foreign language, proposal review activities and nonuniversity employment. This information will be updated every 18 months. Faculty participation in the project is voluntary, and each campus is responsible for its own collection process.

The main hardware is an IBM computer located on Ul's Urbana-Champaign campus; each of the other campuses has a computer and a designated FRATS liaison official. Campus-based users in member institutions will be able to dial-in directly to a FRATS data base or contact a staff assistant for help. Off-campus users can contact a FRATS liaison official to conduct a search. In the future, Zollinger says, it may be possible to have trained staff at the state library with access to the system. In addition, "user friendly" features are being added to the FRATS programming so that eventually nonexperts can use it without assistance.

Both UI and SIU report good response from their faculties when they collected the first set of profiles earlier this year to test out the computer program. According to Peggy Lowry, associate director of data collection at UI's Campuswide Research Services Office, the university hopes to get profiles of all tenured and tenure-track faculty on the Champaign-Urbana campus into the data bank by the end of April 1983. Already, she says, there have been requests from the administration to identify experts in highly specialized areas of research. According to Michael Dingerson, director of research development and administration at SIU-Carbondale, SIU's first effort at data collection concentrated on faculty working in science and technology, particularly those doing coal research. But SIU is also aiming for full participation of its approximately 1,200 faculty members.

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As an organization, the FRATS Project is guided by a council composed of one representative from each of the participating campuses. The University of Illinois is the project's fiscal agent, and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs provides staff for the central office. FRATS has been funded by a Higher Education Cooperation Grant from the Illinois Board of Higher Education for fiscal years 1981, 1982 and 1983. Participating universities also provide financial support. And like most organizations, FRATS is looking for other sources of support, both public and private.

Universities in other states, including Stanford in California and the University of Michigan, have pioneered the faculty profile system on which FRATS is modeled. And in New York state, 100 universities and colleges outside the state system belong to a noncomputerized reference service called Science, Engineering and Research Campus Hookup. According to Zollinger, this organization has already contacted industrial leaders in Illinois — a sign of the aggressive "marketing" of high tech capabilities by universities all over the nation.

Illinois and Ohio are unusual, however, in seeking to establish a faculty research data bank on a statewide basis. "We're all very much concerned with the economic health of Illinois," says Zollinger. "As the state of Illinois goes, so goes higher education .... This idea that we're doing our own thing is an idea of the past."

Today the buzz word is "high tech," and FRATS is being touted as a tool in a competitive race with other states for industries and funds. Who knows what the big problems, the glamorous coalitions — and the main metaphors — will be a few years from now? But there is no question that the need for more expertise from an increasingly large number of people will persist — and probably intensify.

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