Illinois Research Connections Researcher Information System Project
Rebecca Bryant, PhD rabryant@illinois.edu
http://go.illinois.edu/irc
Where do you go to find information
about Illinois expertise?
• Departmental web site?
• Individual web site?
• Google Scholar?
• How do you find information across the Illinois
campus?
2
Project goals
• Goal 1 of the University of Illinois Strategic Plan
proposes the development of a faculty profilesharing database in order to promote scholarship,
discovery & innovation.
• This system will:
– Connect researchers with potential collaborators
– Showcase Illinois research to external stakeholders
– Automate publication data collection from reliable
source(s)
– This project is NOT intended to support activity
reporting and assessment
3
A few use cases
• Faculty, researchers, & staff
– Identify a potential collaborator with niche expertise—on- or offcampus
– Identify potential reviewers with needed expertise—for grant,
fellowship, P&T, and much more
• Grad students/postdocs/undergrads:
– Identify advisors, mentors, and committee members
• External
– Media outlets looking for experts to interview on current events
topics
– General public, BOT, legislators, & potential corporate partners:
view the breadth, depth, and significant of campus research in one
central place.
Project scope
• Collaborative OVCR/Library initiative
• Comprehensive
– Up to 2,500 faculty & researcher profiles
– Inclusion of all HR appointments for each included
researcher
• Interdisciplinary
– Will include all disciplines, academic colleges and
departments at Illinois
– It will also include research-oriented centers and
institutes
5
Governance & communications
• Faculty working group (Feb 2014) defined
project goals & recommended vendor
product
• Steering & governance committees provide
continuing guidance
• Training and ongoing support will be
provided for colleges, departments,
individual researchers
6
Project platform & data sources
• Proprietary product called “Pure” by Elsevier
• Pre-populates profiles with publication
information in Scopus publications index
• Automatic weekly updates from Scopus data
• Automatic creation of FingerprintTM concepts
7
8
Challenges & Opportunities
• Scopus index is comprehensive, but it has some subject area
weaknesses, particularly in HSS
• University Library is working to scrape OCLC WorldCat publications data to
capture monographs & book chapters
• Planning to include in Spring 2016 PUBLIC launch
• Phased roll-out
• Fall 2015: AY2015 TT faculty only—no clinical faculty and only OVCR AP’s
• Will work to include NTT researchers (up to 2,500) after BETA
• Difficult to capture NTT researchers
• Will work with colleges annually to manually collect and maintain these
researchers, beginning Fall 2015
• Users, proxies, & unit-assigned administrators can edit & enhance
profiles
• Online resources/FAQs for users
• Future training sessions for unit administrators
9
Can Users and Units Manage Profile
Content?
• Users may:
– Add publications, hide publications
– Change display name
– Add profile enhancements like a photo or other CV
information
– Delegate a proxy to edit their profile for them
• Units may:
– Unit XOs can assign one or more unit administrators to
maintain records for users within their unit(s)
– Online resources available at http://go.illinois.edu/irc
– In-person workshop and video training coming this fall
10
Timeline
BETA launch
–
–
–
–
–
–
Coming Fall 2015
Working system with Elsevier-delivered publications data
Available to UIUC IP addresses only
AY2015 faculty & OVCR institutes
No humanities faculty or units
Campus-only communications & training, working with units to designate
administrators
PUBLIC launch
–
–
–
–
–
Spring 2016
AY2016 faculty
Inclusion of humanities faculty, units, and better coverage of their publications
Expanded inclusion of NTT researchers, as designated by their colleges
Widespread outreach
11
Longer-term Opportunities
• Expanding coverage
– Add monographs & book chapters from OCLC
WorldCat to enhance humanities/social science coverage
– Campus information: grants, patents
– Unit/individual enhancement of records
– Improve author disambiguation through integration with
ORCID
• Interoperability
– How can other campus systems ingest this
automatically-updated information?
12
DEMO
FAQs
• How will I be able to access?
– There will be a link from http://go.illinois.edu/irc once the portal is live.
• How can colleges allocate non-tenure-line faculty & researchers for
IRC inclusion?
– Annual nomination process by colleges, per allocation formula, up to 2,500 researchers
– http://bit.ly/IRC_NTT
• Can I edit my profile?
–
–
–
–
Yes, via Shibboleth authentication.
Users can delegate proxies to edit their profiles (must be @illinois.edu)
Units can assign unit administrators to manage expert profiles in one or more departments
You can change your display name, add missing publications, manage existing ones, and add
profile enhancements like a photo and other CV information
– Visit our FAQs at http://go.illinois.edu/irc for guidance
• Who do I contact with questions?
– irc-help@lists.illinois.edu
14