Researcher Information Systems Coordinator
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Mark Zulauf has almost 20 years’ worth of administration experience in graduate education and research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After joining the campus as a scientific editor with the Prairie Research Institute, Zulauf then moved to the Graduate College to help develop and roll out the campuswide electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) deposit program. In 2016, he moved to the University Library to lead the university's research information management (RIM) service, which currently supports nearly 3,000 researcher profiles across a public portal and multiple campus websites. In recognition of his efforts relating to RIM, he was awarded the university’s Chancellor’s Staff Excellence Award in 2023.
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.


