STEDEX '09PREREQUISITES FOR INDEXING DESIGN ARTICLES AT INSTITUTIONAL LEVELWe have mentioned earlier two related factors for us to be successful in our indexing goals. The first required us changing the criteria for the university’s annual academic performance. These proposed criteria are expected to motivate design academicians to attain the best possible annual evaluation marks by doing what they were good at. Credit should be given to the Dean’s Office for ensuring our voices were heard at UPM’s management level. There were a number of strategic planning workshops, management meetings and technical meetings where members of the faculty’s management team were present to convey our message across. We found the formation of alliances and collaborations with like faculties in UPM during the determination of academic evaluation criteria for the social sciences division fruitful. We were given suggestions during the course of our participations that our design faculty could not really park itself under either the social science or science and technology division. At this instant, the faculty is more comfortable leaning on the social science root. Nevertheless, the faculty would like UPM to seriously consider this matter since Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) has acknowledged these independent differences more than 30 years ago by establishing the A&HCI. The faculty is pleased to inform that it has successfully integrated its visual communication outputs or activities leading towards those endeavours into the university’s academic performance evaluation criteria albeit under the social science’s division. The second factor is qualifying visual and audio artifacts as citation-indexed articles in selected indexed databases. Our case’s defense was mostly founded on Garfield’s (1977) position in establishing the A&HCI by the reputable ISI. Let us remind ourselves about a typical publishing process in a scientific journal. When we submit a journal article, the chief editor of the journal will review and ascertain its acceptance to the journal’s theme. He or she will then distribute the journal article to at least two blind reviewers to review the content and contribution to the field’s body of knowledge. The reviewers will provide comments to the chief editor and inform him or her about the acceptance level of that journal article. The Chief Editor then provides the reviewers’ comments to the author and informs him the review process’s result. Upon the journal article’s acceptance, a number of activities will take place such as preparation for printing, confirmation of artwork, obtaining the necessary authenticity agreement from the author and transfer of copyrights to the publisher. A design artifact is required to go through a similar process although it is slightly different in the overall outcome. A registered exhibition to an authority body conveys similar weightage as a journal issue. The museum is the ultimate “impact factor journal” for a design artifact especially if it is among the established ones. When a call for artifacts is made for a registered exhibition, artisans will submit their works to be reviewed by independent members of the design communities. The curator of an exhibition plays similar role as the editor for a special journal issue. A review will be made by several layers of review panels as the organiser selects the best artifacts that would represent the theme of the exhibition. These reviews are very important and are indexed in various arts and humanities databases. Eventually, the artifacts are also catalogued and indexed but the biggest challenge is storing them safely before, during and after the exhibition. Hence, the need of a welldesigned gallery or museum with properly controlled indoor environment for its protection is critical. The faculty is currently in the process of developing its own gallery at the faculty for this purpose. We are grateful to receive UPM Management’s support that the ultimate place for our design output is in an exhibition. UPM has applied to be a member of an international organisation for museums through its local regional office with the faculty as the secretariat. UPM’s membership under the university category will be the first in the country since other members are galleries or museums to date. The level and place of exhibition determines the significance and impact factor of the design output. The levels of exhibition may range from departmental, faculty, university, national and international synonym to seminar, conference, refereed journal, citation-indexed journal and impact factor journal for a written article. Each registered exhibition has its own checklist of things to do to meet the necessary quality. One key criterion is developing the indexing database at each exhibition level. We are starting to develop our own design index through our “Sustainable Tropical Environmental Design Exhibition (STEdex)” with the assistance and support of UPM’s library this year and will keep building on it in the future. Moreover, we are grateful that the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovations) has already included important steps and quality criteria into its quality manual documents that would support our exhibition endeavour. «« BACK |
