Research Information Systems: The Connections Enabling Collaboration

Making Sense of the Confusing World of Research Information Management

Research Information Management (RIM) is the aggregation, curation, & utilization of metadata about institutional research activities, and represents growing resource allocations by research institutions worldwide. As institutions, consortia, and nations attempt to solve different problems, their systems, workflows, infrastructure, and nomenclature are developing in different ways. In this presentation, Dr. Bryant will provide an introduction to the RIM landscape and offer a model for understanding RIM activities, developed in collaboration with OCLC Research Library Partnership member institutions (http://www.oclc.org/research/partnership.html) from three continents. She will talk about the key drivers for RIM adoption, and how these have influenced RIM adoption and scaling in EMEA, North America, and the Asia-Pacific.

Developing work at OCLC Research regarding research information management 

A recent poster about OCLC Research efforts

Creating a Culture of Research Reputation through Research Information Management Systems

Research institutions have increasingly strong needs to manage the reputations of their research portfolios. From primary investigators, to awarded grants, scholarly output and related media mention, universities need to be able to retrieve and integrate information about their research endeavors in order to successfully showcase impact at an institutional level. However, all too often this information is siloed and not easily discoverable, retrievable, or reusable. Syracuse University Libraries traditionally provide research reputation services to individual researchers, but recently collaborated with the Office of Research to expand this work in a systematic, scalable manner throughout the university via a pilot implementation of a Research Information Management System (RIMS). This partnership helped the Libraries demonstrate value in a new way to different stakeholders as an important member of the university research enterprise. The presenters will give an overview of RIMS, discuss the implementation of such a system at Syracuse University, outline challenges that implementing such systems present, and articulate why libraries should be involved in their operation. The speakers will also address impacts of the use of these systems, and their complex data needs, on the broader information community.

OCLC Report Referenced by Scott Warren: Evolving Scholarly Record

Enabling and Encouraging Use of the RIS/CRIS System

As the first Canadian university to purchase Elsevier’s Pure, the project team at the University of Waterloo continues our implementation, as phase one goes live in Sept.
From the onset, Waterloo’s strategic plan has driven this initiative. Our project goal: reduce the time and effort required on administrative processes and allow our researchers to focus on their actual research.

Our project has been a collective effort from our library, research, IT and data departments and throughout, we have strived to engage and listen to our six faculties.
This session will review topics that this type of enterprise system has affected, including:

• The hard and soft costs of a collaborative, cross-departmental project
• Significant importance of involving the library early
• Project resources: thinking outside the SME
• Hosting: where is my data? Cloud or local?

VIVO: A Community-driven Research Information Management System. Challenges and Opportunities

VIVO is a community-driven open source software that creates a connected, integrated record of scholarly works ready for reporting, visualization and analysis. VIVO uses Linked Data model and in the core of this application is VIVO-ISF ontology – a data model used by many institutions around the world and thus makes the data interoperable.

In this presentation, we will discuss some of the history of VIVO project and question ourselves that “is VIVO a research data recording system only”? “Can VIVO be evolved in a research information management system where VIVO not only records the data but also provides aggregate views of the scholarship and scholarly work”. Can VIVO answer questions such as “who are the experts in what subject area” without having any manual input from faculty members? Can VIVO answer questions about internal and global collaborations for a specific academic unit? Can VIVO be used to collect impact evidences of a faculty member’s research for next grant application. We will discuss the opportunities and the challenges in the light of our work “Scholars@Cornell” at Cornell University Library.

Commercial RIS Systems: Benefits, Costs, and Considerations of Use

This talk will discuss the benefits and costs generated by commercial RIS systems, as well as other key considerations and best practices institutions should consider prior to any purchase. These include speed of implementation, buy vs. build considerations, total cost of ownership analysis, data quality assurance and quality control, data deduplication and disambiguation, data model robustness, vendor management, and other key factors affecting implementation success. The presenter will draw on his prior experience evaluating software vendor proposals and as a project manager implementing major OTS software systems at Columbia University and NYU School Medicine, as well as 10 years working on product development for Elsevier.

RIS as Part of Larger Environment of Systems

In 2011, Virginia Tech Libraries launched a DSpace-based institutional repository service called VTechWorks. In 2012, the Libraries began to explore integration of the repository with the university’s Electronic Faculty Activity Reporting System (EFARS), a service managed by the Provost’s office, in an effort to reduce barriers to deposit and in response to faculty feedback on ways to encourage the adoption of open access publishing practices. Presenters will briefly review the current state of implementation of Virginia Tech’s EFARS, all levels of partnership involved in implementation, the evolving roles for the library, and the technical, policy, rights, workflow, outreach, and publishing issues involved in establishing VT Libraries’ repository and public researcher profile services as integral components of the university’s networked research infrastructure.

Case Study I: GTScholar: lessons learned in RIM/CRIS implementation

Georgia Tech was one of the first United States institutions to adopt a Research Information Management (RIM) system. In response to Georgia Tech's 2010 strategic plan, in 2012 a group of faculty and staff from across campus began to discuss the implementation of a faculty profile system, which ultimately led to the adoption of a RIM system called GTScholar. GTScholar would be a central repository of simple and updated faculty profiles that could be accessed widely for the benefit of the Georgia Tech community and external audiences. The project had many successes, but it met some challenges as well: chief among those were a reliance on databases created and maintained for other purposes and project scope creep in response to evolving needs and potential of the product. This case study presentation will trace the path of proposing, planning, implementing, and ultimately pausing development of GTScholar in 2016.

Case Study II: From Researcher Profiling to System of Record

One look at the home screen of the University of Minnesota's Experts@Minnesota tells you that this is a sprawling institution: Experts@Minnesota includes public profiles for 6,400 faculty and staff organized into almost 300 research units. At last count, it held almost 230,000 research outputs. Such a near-comprehensive data set brings benefits as well as challenges. Ms. Fransen will review those challenges, both initial and ongoing, and discuss the rationale for the 2012-15 pilot project as well as the current (often unexpected) benefits of the service. She will also discuss key partnerships and review the Experts@Minnesota roadmap.