Call for Proposals

The Program Committee for the Expert Finder Systems International Forum 2023 is excited to announce we are now accepting proposals for presentations at our upcoming conference, which will be held in person, April 5-6, 2023, at the University of Miami Expo Center, Miami/Coral Gables, Florida.

About

Since the first EFS International Forum in 2019, a growing community has been engaging in an important dialogue. Conversations center on:

• Metadata used to tell the impact stories of faculty members, research institutes, centers, and foundations
• Federal-, state-, and privately funded research
• Economic development efforts
• Community engagement.

We invite people from across the research information management and faculty success technologies communities to share their experience and expertise.

The systems and use cases we have been discussing take many forms and are known by an assortment of names. These include but are not limited to:

• Research information management systems (RIMS)
• Research networking systems (RNS)
• Expertise discovery
• Content-rich profiling and networking sites
• Current research information systems (CRIS)
• Faculty information systems (FIS)

These systems are of growing importance in the Americas, as they provide a way to curate the institutional scholarly record, support institutional and individual reputation management, aid in the discovery of experts and team science formation, and aggregate content that can be used for reporting and strategic decision support.

Theme & Goals

The theme of this year’s EFS Forum is "Connecting the Dots," which reflects the aspirational goal of the conference to facilitate engagement, understanding, and community building across a diversity of silos. These include discrete use cases, stakeholders, and product user communities, among others. In addition to greater technical interoperability across systems, we also hope to facilitate greater "social interoperability."

The EFS program committee invites proposals that describe efforts to advocate for, implement, sustain, and/or expand the kinds of platforms and use cases under discussion. Preference will be given to proposals that relate to the conference theme of "Connecting the Dots."

We encourage you to think broadly and creatively about ways your work leverages metadata to develop connectivity and interoperability–both social and technical. This might include:

• Collaborating across your institution’s units to implement or administer one or more platforms
• Forming partnerships with entities outside your company or institution, such as partnerships between universities, businesses, and government
• Facilitating interdisciplinary expertise discovery and team science
• Advocating for and implementing persistent identifiers
• Unifying data sources across the institution
• Enabling deeper insight through improved research analytics
• Creating policies and practices to improve communications and clarify roles across the institution
• Managing labor, planning, and responsibility for system administration
• Establishing relationships with stakeholders whose work is represented in the system
• Making the system work for all stakeholders

Who Is Invited to Present

We want to hear from practitioners, system administrators, researchers, users, support staff, and product providers across the community, whether you work at a college or university, a government office, a funding agency, or in industry. There are many platforms, use cases, and stakeholders. This event is for all of us.

We welcome talks from first-time speakers, long-time users, new practitioners, and everyone in between. We encourage talks from underrepresented groups within the community. Our goal is to expose participants to a variety of practices and practitioners so they are able to “connect the dots” with an expanded view of the community.

Requirements

EFS Forum presenters will be required to:

• Register for and attend the conference
• Share their slides or poster presentation with event organizers for posting on the forum website

Available Session Formats

1. Presentation: The presentation format allows presenters to share about relevant practices, research, or collaborations. They may report on research findings, describe research or efforts in progress, and/or provide a provocative view on a topic of interest. Presentations will be allotted 20-30 minutes each, at the discretion of the program committee.
2. Panel: Panel sessions offer 2-4 presenters the opportunity to share diverse perspectives, fresh approaches, and practical information around a central topic. Panel presentations will be allotted 45-60 minutes, at the discretion of the program committee.
3. Poster: Poster sessions offer the opportunity for informal interaction around an array of topics. Conference posters will be available throughout the event, and presenters will have the opportunity to engage directly with participants during a designated time slot.

All presentations must take place in person.

Selection Criteria

The EFS Program Committee will evaluate proposals for their relevance to the community and the conference theme. In order to meet our aspirational goal to "connect the dots" for the community, we are particularly seeking to develop a program that represents diverse viewpoints, stakeholders, and use cases.

Submit Your Proposal by the Deadline

The submission deadline is October 24, 2022 has been extended through Friday, November 4, 2022, at 11:50 pm EDT (UTC-4). Following review by the program committee, submitters will be notified about their proposal standing in early December.

Questions? Please contact Rebecca Bryant at bryantr@oclc.org.