Program

The implementation of Carnegie Mellon University's research information management system, Elements, along with the tightly coupled Expert Finder System, Scholars@CMU, positioned the CMU Libraries, the platform's product owner, at the center of the research enterprise at Carnegie Mellon. This move introduced the libraries to entirely new and demanding customers and partners. This presentation will outline the challenges of engaging campus business partners in a remarkably decentralized environment and will present strategies and tactics used by the libraries to facilitate a successful platform launch, system adoption, and the launch of affiliated reporting and data visualization services. This case study will examine strategies for managing stakeholder relationships throughout the RIMS ecosystem and identifying unmet data reporting needs across campus.

A small team of three Oklahoma State University librarians have led the implementation and administration of Experts Directory, a RIM System hosted by Symplectic Elements, beginning in late 2019. This presentation will focus on the unique service model we developed at OSU, where the librarians are the sole system administrators and have managed the entire process of configuring the external and internal data feeds with campus IT, HR, Grants, the Registrar, campus communications, university administration, and faculty members themselves. We will discuss our processes for building and managing these relationships during implementation and how the partnerships have evolved now that the project is stable and includes live public profiles for over 600 faculty members. Although procurement was finalized prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the implementation took place afterwards, and the presentation will talk about how working remotely impacted system rollout. We will also address the benefits to the library of our leadership of the project, such as integrating with the institutional repository and giving us opportunity to build technical skills that transfer to other library projects. We will close with the challenges of RIM system administration with a small library team and offer some lessons learned and suggestions for other institutions working in this space.

Learn how Florida International University has used information management principles and practices to build an infrastructure that drives the connection of people, processes, and technologies within and beyond the university's diverse R1 scholarly community. With speakers from key leadership roles in the university's provost and research offices, the presentation will provide a diverse, but unifying, perspective on how information management has facilitated success across many initiatives. Some of the initiatives to be covered include research development strategy and execution, research compliance efforts with the upcoming federal initiatives like NSPM-33 and the CHIPS Act, and the implementation of new program initiatives aimed to enable faculty success across all disciplines and digital touchpoints.

Research information management systems (RIMS) have become critical components of information technology infrastructure on university campuses. They are used not just for sharing and promoting faculty research, but also for conducting faculty evaluation and development, facilitating research collaborations, and identifying mentors for student projects and expert consultants for local businesses. This study is one of the first empirical investigations of the structure of researchers' scholarly profile maintenance activities in a non-mandatory institutional RIMS. By analyzing the RIMS's log data, we identified 11 tasks researchers performed when updating their profiles. These tasks were further grouped into three activities: adding publication, enhancing researcher identity, and improving research discoverability. In addition, we found that junior researchers and female researchers were more engaged in maintaining their RIMS profiles than senior researchers and male researchers. The results provide insights for designing profile maintenance action templates for institutional RIMS that are tailored to researchers' characteristics and help enhance researchers' engagement in the curation of their research information. This also suggests that female and junior researchers can serve as early adopters of institutional RIMS.

This study aims to explore the value, growth, and sustainability of state-wide innovation initiatives using expert system web portals. The research focused on multi-university initiatives, preferably state-wide, connecting university resources to industries and companies to discover innovation initiatives' value propositions created for businesses. During interviews with the representatives of the expert innovation systems across the U.S., the research examined the usage and sustainability of the innovation initiatives and inquired about marketing strategies, staffing, data domains, and incentives to develop, use, and sustain the initiatives. As a result of this study, a set of lessons learned and suggested strategies will be presented to discuss.

A common use case of research information management systems is the ability to increase discovery and awareness of research output and other scholarly activities of faculty and researchers via the usage of a central portal. Beyond the provided means of indexing and showcasing people and outputs, institutions may want to use the RIM system to "connect the dots" to particular research communication initiatives or research campaigns within their organization via the content provided within their RIM portals. Whether through the increased awareness of internal strategic research goals (such as research health communities) or through broader research initiatives (such as Open Access Week or Breast Cancer Awareness Month), institutions want to be able to showcase and highlight the diversity and complexity of their organization's research focuses. This panel presentation will bring together several academic institutions and research institutes to highlight the use of the RIM system as a major driver for strategic research communication campaigns. Presenters will describe how their institutions have used their systems to showcase these initiatives and present potential opportunities for additional research communication practices and organizational stakeholders that can benefit from the RIM system and portal capabilities.