Charting the Informational Universe
September 16-18, 2025
Cleveland, OH
SPEAKERS
Rachel Miles
Assistant Director for Research Impact and Information Management
Virginia Tech
Rachel Miles is the research impact coordinator at Virginia Tech University Libraries and specializes in research analytics, such as citation analyses and co-authorship networks; she also offers consultations, instruction, and expertise in bibliometrics, altmetrics, research communication, academic publishing, copyright, Open Access, and research evaluation. She advocates for responsible and ethical research evaluation by working with partners across campus to bring awareness and insight into how the academic incentive system and academic culture affects individual faculty members' well being, mental health, publication behavior, and motivations.
In her position, Rachel works with individual faculty members, researchers, and administrators to populate researcher profile systems, the Research Information Management (RIM) system, interpret and visualize research impact data, and analyze research and researcher data.
Rachel is also the library liaison to the Virginia Tech Psychology Department and the School of Neuroscience and offers faculty, staff, and students consultation, instruction, and reference answers to research questions, search strategies, and database inquiries.
Sessions
2:40 pm - 3:10 pm
At the heart of a valued research information management (RIM) service is a well-curated set of easily accessible and trustworthy data that describe an institution's research activity. The cultivation of those data into beneficial use cases requires ongoing collaboration among myriad stakeholders from within the research development community (librarians, faculty administrators, communications specialists, technology licensing agents, facility and equipment managers, IT personnel, etc.).
This presentation will explore the social interoperability involved in nurturing the library-managed RIM services at two major midwestern research universities—from the partnerships involved in unifying previously siloed sources of data to the use cases supported in each campus' quest to understand, report on, and showcase its research accomplishments.
The presenters will discuss several collaborations, including creating a workflow to harvest local patents data and supplement with details from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, leveraging Crossref publication data to support communications professionals in efforts to pitch research-related stories to major news media, and porting legacy faculty activity data into a single, centralized campus repository in order to retire aging unit websites and databases.
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