Our Mission to Share Our Research
As a Carleton University Research Centre, our mission at CIMS is to share our valuable knowledge and research. CIMS has always actively participated in traditional academic avenues such as publishing, conferences, and the training and development of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP). But to truly achieve our mission, we had to ask ourselves: how could we share our research more effectively and reach a wider audience beyond the academic reach of papers, journals, conferences, and training?
When Professor Stephen Fai became Director of CIMS in 2007, he realigned the lab’s research objectives to address the emerging paradigm of using digital tools for architectural heritage conservation and rehabilitation. Since then, CIMS has published over 100 papers, created an international network of over 50 partners, and championed two major training grants on digital heritage (links to NSERC CREATE and SSHRC NPNT).
By 2017, we were well overdue for a major redesign of our website and recognized this as an opportunity to share our knowledge with a broader audience. The focus of redeveloping the CIMS website was to transform it into a tool for knowledge mobilization through blogs and social media posts. Our posts became a means to talk about the workflows and best practices we had developed over the past 10 years, for example:
An Introduction to Photogrammetry
Optimizing BIM for Virtual Reality Experiences
Soon we started receiving questions and comments from practitioners around the globe. We quickly realized a post could only scratch the surface of these complex workflows.
With the digital landscape changing so quickly, two years after our first website redesign, it was time for another. Again, we asked ourselves, what could we do as an academic research centre to share our knowledge more effectively? Our response was to create a publications page with direct links to each paper. High-level workflows from our posts are linked to highly detailed descriptions in our academic research papers. The publication page is completely searchable and filterable by topic and document type.
It’s been close to three years since we started writing blogs. Which topics would you like to see more of? What are the digital challenges you’re currently facing in your projects? How can we share our knowledge more effectively? Let us know – info@cims.carleton.ca