User Group Meetings

The Scholars@Duke team holds quarterly user group meetings that are open to the public and particularly to the Scholars@Duke and Elements user communities. Updates are provided on new features, outreach, and future development, as well as, important information shared to consumers of Scholars and Elements data across campus. These meetings are typically held on the first Tuesday afternoon of the quarter from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

2023 User Group Meeting Schedule

 

February 7, 2023: Remote via Zoom Meeting

April 4, 2023: Remote via Zoom Meeting

September 12, 2023: Remote via Zoom Meeting

December 5, 2023: Remote via Zoom Meeting

 

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Meeting Summaries

April 4, 2023

Q2 2023 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Scholars Data in Action: Examples from the Medical Center Library Presentation Link

Q2 2023 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next Scholars training session is Thursday, April 20th, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. See our Training page to register.
• Next User Group meeting is Tuesday, September 12th, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

February 7, 2023

Q1 2023 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q1 2023 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next Scholars training session is Thursday, February 16th, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. See our Training page to register.
• Next User Group meeting is Tuesday, April 4th, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

December 6, 2022

Q4 2022 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

myRESEARCHhome and myRESEARCHpath Overview Presentation Link

Q4 2022 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next Scholars training session is Thursday, January 19th, 2022 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. See our Training page to register.
• Next User Group meeting is Tuesday, February 7th, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

September 13, 2022

Q3 2022 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Trinity Directory Tool Presentation Link

Q3 2022 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next Scholars training session is Thursday, September 29th, 2022 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

April 5, 2022

Q2 2022 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q2 2022 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next info session is Thursday, April 28th, 2022 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is Tuesday, September 13th, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

February 1, 2022

Q1 2022 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q1 2022 User Group Meeting Guest Speaker Presentation Link

Q1 2022 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next info session is Thursday, February 10th, 2022 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is Tuesday, April 5th, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

April 6, 2021

Q2 2021 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q2 2021 User Group Meeting Guest Speaker Presentation Link

Q2 2021 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next info session is Thursday, April 8th, 2021 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is TBD

February 2, 2021

Q1 2021 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q1 2021 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next info session is Thursday, February 11th, 2021 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is April 6th, 2021 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

October 6, 2020

Q4 2020 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q4 2020 User Group Meeting Recording Link

Important Notes

• Next info session is Thursday, October 15th, 2020 from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is February 2nd, 2021 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

August 4, 2020

Meeting Cancelled

April 7, 2020

Meeting Cancelled

February 4, 2020

Update on Tableau

• Go to tableau.oit.duke.edu and choose the Duke Community. Choose the Scholars@Duke folder. Damaris Murry has built a lot of dashboards for Scholars data.
• Damaris showed a couple of use cases, such as "who's working with international collaborators?" Colors show how many different departments are involved.  Or "who's doing research on asthma?"
• You can use the date field to restrict dates and the schools field to restrict further. Then you can click the name and the publication.
• You can also download a list of publications.

Reporting on Publications from Elements

• Paolo Mangifico gave a demo of the reporting functionality in Elements. You'll need the Statistician role in Elements, and can request it by emailing elements@duke.edu. Be sure to give them your name, DUID and department.
• Go to Basic reports, and choose the user or users whose publications you want to list, choose dates, Note that dates are in DD/MM/YYYY which is different from the typical style in the U.S. There are other selections you can choose. Then select "Get Report."
• Publications will appear in the Excel window. Paolo also showed how to update author IDs to facilitated automatic claiming of publications. He also demonstrated a number of reports that are available, for example, to show delegates, login dates, H-index, and a summary of all publications.
• Group vs. Comparitive reports can give users a lot more information such as citation counts for the publications source. Paolo cautioned that all of these reports have limitations; they reflect the publications in Elements and different bibliographic sources count citations differently and thus report different H-indices. Similarly, the Impact Factor should be considered in context and not as the authoritative metric of a scholar's impact. Very large reports will take a very long time.
• To run a Comparitive report, you need the Statistician role for two or more departments/schools. You select two units for which you have access, and it compares publication metrics for the two schools.
• DukeSpace is Duke's Open Access Repository, into which publications have been loaded and are available to anyone in the world. DukeSpace contains Altmetrics and lots of other information about how these publications are being used and discussed throughout the world.

Development update

• Richard Outten talked about changing Industry Relationships to External Relationships.
• We are improving widgets to work with Drupal 8.
• There are improvements to the CV including fixing double periods after the title.
• The team is working on the new VIVO Scholar front-end, including a GraphQL endpoint. The new tools should be much easier for the web developers who are consuming this data.

Road map

• Julia announced she'll be stepping down March 31 and will work part-time until July.
• dFac 5.1 should be released by the end of the year. Improvements are primarily bug fixes.
• DKU faculty integration with dFac.
• Duplicate publications.
• VIVO Scholar and work with VIVO.

Outreach update

• Lamont shared that we did a Power User event for Arts & Sciences in December and had a great panel talk about how to provide stellar power user support.
• Scholars Photo Day in October was an amazing success (266 participants!).
• Faculty are adding presentations to their profiles.
• Pageviews, total visitors and Duke sessions are all increasing steadily.

Communications/Tip of the Month

• Hans Harlacher did a Communications update. He showed the Tip of the Month, indicated that they will now be distributed during the first week of each month, and clarified that we don't send emails directly to faculty, so please share them with your faculty.
• Users can subscribe to Scholars announcements directly.

Support policy

• We have transitioned to a new policy for support. "How-to" questions will be sent directly to Power Users. Please make sure you're aware of your dFac user and iForms user locally.
• If you identify a system problem, please have a Power User submit the problem report.
• Please refer to the resources on the Support page like the FAQ.

Next meeting

• Next info session is Thursday, February 20th, 2020 from 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. See our Training page for more details.
• Next User Group meeting is April 7th, 2020 from 8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

Q1 2020 User Group Meeting Presentation Link

Q1 2020 User Group Meeting Recording Link

October 8, 2019

Update on MyResearchHome

• Derek Jones gave us an update about MyResearchHome (MRH.duke.edu), which is a useful portal for Duke staff, faculty and researchers. The new Funding Opportunities widget is now live and uses a lot of Scholars data to help researchers find funding opportunities in their disciplines. Users set up a funding profile, using the Subject Headings from Scholars. These are matched up with the Funding database in the Grants office.
• The MyPortfolio widget shows active projects, roles, percent effort, proposals and renewals. There is a shared view for faculty and research administrators – they see the same information. Fund code balances will be displayed in the future.
• In the future, there will be alerts about funding opportunities, training, other deadlines and so on. Currently, attestations are emailed to faculty. They will eventually be notifying users of other deadlines and requirements as well.
• MRH consumes Scholars data already in the Find a Collaborators widget but MRH will have a lot more integration with Scholars when this widget rolls out.

Data Consumers Update

• Damaris Murry, Assistant Director and data guru, displayed the new Industry Relationships section. This section shows the companies with whom faculty have a reported relationship from their annual Conflict of Interest form. Please remind faculty who have questions about updating to read the HOW TO EDIT section.
• Also, we created doctoral student profiles in August. Each year, some students might be missed so if there are missing profiles, please create them manually (your power user can do that.)
• Please ask your students to add a photo and an overview. It really improves the profile.
• Elements can find and load publications automatically but it needs users to add researcher IDs. The Scholars team assists with this process but we don’t always know what to add—we don’t have their CVs and we can’t tell if a publications is theirs.

Reminders about data integrity issues:

• Users reported bad data from the RePEc data source – this was a source problem, not a Scholars problem.
• Directory data is sometimes wrong but should be corrected in the Duke Directory, not in Scholars.
• Often, home addresses are incorrectly added to the External Address field in dFac or Duke@Work. These should be corrected in the source systems.
• New to Tableau: we’ve updated the Scholars dashboards in Tableau, particularly for publications and grants. Check them out at http://tableau.oit.duke.edu.
• Drupal update: many department websites are built or maintained by Duke Web Services. We have created a Drupal module to simplify the feeds of data from Scholars and will be upgraded to Drupal 8 soon. There will be a lot of new Scholars sections added to to the new Drupal module. Also, new sections in Scholars will be easier to add to the Drupal module. These new sections will be added to the Drupal 8 and not in Drupal 7.

Road Map

• In Q2, developers will be finishing the people loads and working on importing publication citation formats from Zotero, a service that improves citation formatting.
• On April 15, we are starting the VIVO Scholar Task force, a collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine, CU Boulder and University of Alabama at Birmingham to develop a new, read-only front end for VIVO which we can use with Scholars. This new front end will be faster, more modern, and easier to enhance so that we can add new features. For example, faculty want to be able to tag their favorite publications and order them in various ways.

Outreach Update

• Lamont continued meeting with faculty one-on-one about Scholars and the SOM APT CV.
• Faculty would like to be able to tag their most important publications at the top of their profile.
• Lamont has met individually with power users.
• Scholars Photo Day had 211 participants and the process went very smoothly.
• Faculty edits of their profiles continue to increase and now 62% of faculty have edited their profiles since we rolled out. Presentations are being edited more than any other activity. In Q1, Scholars got about 180,000 users.

Tip of the Month

• Please share the Tips of the Month with your faculty! And remind faculty to subscribe to Faculty Announcements.
• Support questions we received:
• How do I change the affiliation for a non-faculty profile?
• Power users will need to add the new affiliation before remove the previous affiliation.

Next meeting

• Tuesday, February 4th at 8:30 am
• Training is coming on Thursday, October 17th in Bostock. Check the support site for more information.

User Group Meeting Presentation Link

August 6, 2019

Data Consumers update

• Industry Relationships will be added as a new section on Scholars@Duke profiles in Q3.
• The Duke Research Page has a Find a Collaborator widget that enables users to search for faculty in Scholars@Duke.
• Tableau Update: Publications view can now be filtered by faculty appointment type.
• Implemented measures to cleanup a significant number of duplicate publications in Elements.
• Implemented a new third-party service called Zotero which improves the accuracy of the four citation formats in Scholars@Duke. Also, full author first names are now displayed in the MLA and Chicago styles and PubMed Journal abbreviations are now automatically selected for School of Medicine citations.

Development update

• Key Q2 Improvements:
• Added AFFILIATION_ORG_UNITS to affiliations view (better way to create people groups in Elements).
• Implemented accessibility fixes suggested by DWS.
• Refreshed Scholars@Duke home page photos and add photo captions.
• Added dollars to Grants (request from Steering Committee).
• Used Pubmed Source for School of Medicine Publications.
• Implemented use of Zotero to improve citations.
• Made updates to Scholars home page link styling.
• Updated Terms of Use in Scholars@Duke.
• Grant Loads.

• Key Q2 Bug Fixes:
• Broken Homepage Search Bar.
• Fix issue with orphan PersonKeyword removal (test & prod).
• User data not showing up in widgets (reported by Dr. Yu).
• Non-faculty affiliations list is incomplete (English and other orgs not in list).
• PubMed ID repeated in some CV citations.
• Profiles not re-indexing (missing 500x500 photos).
• Professorships not listed in Scholars@Duke Appointment History (Remove past professorships from the appointment history list in profile manager ).
• Duplicate publications coming out of the API feed.
• Fix "out of sync" false positive message in CV/Biosketch generator.

Road Map

• In Q3, developers and the Scholars team will continue work on the VIVO Scholars data model and UI and advising and mentoring improvements.
• Also, we will be implementing a new support policy effective in January 2020 that more heavily emphasizes faculty to contact their power users directly with general and how-to questions and only submit help tickets to report system problems and technical issues that power users to do not have the access to resolve.

Outreach Update

• Lamont delivered a Scholars@Duke workshop onsite for the Population Health Sciences faculty and continued meeting with faculty one-on-one about Scholars and the SOM APT CV.
• Scholars Photo Day at the Doctoral Student Academy in May enabled 67 participants to sit for professional headshots to be used in Scholars and their other online profiles and professional opportunities.
• 62% of total faculty profiles have been updated -- Sanford School of Public Policy has the highest level of engagement at 85.5%.
• The most frequent edits by faculty members themselves in Q2 were Overviews (254), Presentations (223), Photos (203), and Awards and Honors (162).
• The most frequent edits by delegates on behalf of faculty in Q2 were Presentations (583), Service to the Profession (334), Awards and Honors (133), and Service to Duke University (111).
• Overall pageviews (356,586), Total Visitors (134,596), and Duke Sessions (28,323) in Q2 continue to increase year over year.

Communications Update

• Tip of the Month emails are sent out the last week of each month - Please review and share with your faculty, staff, and graduate students as appropriate.
• Tip of the Month emails help increase awareness of Scholars and its features and benefits in your organization.
• Q2 Tip of the Months were reviewed:
• April --- Take pride in your accomplishments (Awards and Honors).
• May --- Showcase your presentations (Presentations and Appearances).
• June --- Add or update your web links.
• If your faculty would like to receive the Tip of the month emails or other announcements directly from the Scholars team, please refer them to our “Subscribe to Announcements” link (in the upper right corner of any Scholars@Duke web page) to join our Scholars Announcements email distribution list.

Scholars Support Update

• “Submit a Help Ticket” will become “Report a System Problem” .
• ServiceNow Incidents will become Tasks.
• Users will call the Help Desk to create Incidents (urgent problems).
• “How-to” questions will be referred to local resources:
• Power users
• dFac expert users in deans’ offices
• Online materials

Next meeting

• Tuesday, October 8th at 8:30 am
• Training is coming on Thursday, August 22nd in Bostock and Tuesday, August 27th at Seeley Mudd Conference Room 212C. Check the support site for more information.

User Group Meeting Presentation Link

April 2, 2019

Guest Presentation: MyResearchHome (MRH) Funding Opportunities Widget

• Derek Jones gave us an update about MyResearchHome (MRH.duke.edu), which is a useful portal for Duke staff, faculty and researchers.
• The new Funding Opportunities widget will display funding opportunities from Duke’s Office of Sponsored Research’s database.
• In MRH, users can choose subject headings that are already in their Scholars profiles.
• In the future, the MRH team would like to populate new terms in the Scholars vocabulary.
• They will be rolling the FO widget out in the next couple of weeks.
• MRH consumes Scholars data already in the Search for Collaborators widget but MRH will have a lot more integration with Scholars when this widget rolls out.

Data Consumers update

• Damaris Murry, Senior Data Curator, showed the Scholars widgets and how non-developers can use them.
• It’s worth the time investment to explore these dashboards to learn some of the benefits.
• The JSON feed is a great way to look at all the available widgets data. Damaris shared a handout:
• Damaris demonstrated some of the Tableau databases that are available to download Scholars data from the Duke Community source.
• Damaris showed the research interests dashboard and showed how to set up alerts about new publications and grants, filtered by topic if you’d like. She showed how to download data for an ad-hoc group by typing in people in Select One or More Duke Scholars.
• The Tableau dashboards are quick and easy to customize so please send requests for changes to our Help system.

Development update

• Completed tasks:
• Refreshed faculty photos on home page.
• Full text icon is Data Access for datasets.
• Bug fixes:
• Future-dated appointments were being shown when they should not have been. This has been fixed.
• Appointment history was not working correctly with non-sequential appointments. This is now fixed.
• Appointments were taking much too long to load from FDR due to the above bugs. This is now fixed.
• In progress:
• Accessibility fixes suggested by the Duke’s accessibility office.
• Finishing up work on improving the loads. We’ll rollout the new people load from SAP to FDR on May 5th.
• Using Zotero to improve citation formats.

Road Map

• In Q2, developers will be finishing the people loads and working on importing publication citation formats from Zotero, a service that improves citation formatting.
• On April 15, we are starting the VIVO Scholar Task force, a collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine, CU Boulder and University of Alabama at Birmingham to develop a new, read-only front end for VIVO which we can use with Scholars. This new front end will be faster, more modern, and easier to enhance so that we can add new features. For example, faculty want to be able to tag their favorite publications and order them in various ways.

Outreach Update

• Lamont continued meeting with faculty one-on-one about Scholars and the SOM APT CV.
• Faculty would like to be able to tag their most important publications at the top of their profile.
• Lamont has met individually with power users.
• Scholars Photo Day had 211 participants and the process went very smoothly.
• Faculty edits of their profiles continue to increase and now 62% of faculty have edited their profiles since we rolled out. Presentations are being edited more than any other activity. In Q1, Scholars got about 180,000 users.

Tip of the Month

• Please share the Tips of the Month with your faculty! And remind faculty to subscribe to Faculty Announcements.
• Support questions we received:
• How do I change the affiliation for a non-faculty profile?
• Power users will need to add the new affiliation before remove the previous affiliation.

Next meeting

• Tuesday, August 6th at 8:30 am
• Training is coming on Thursday April 11 in Bostock and Tuesday April 16 in Seeley Mudd conference room 212C. Check the support site for more information.

User Group Meeting Presentation Link

February 5, 2019

Data Consumers update

• Damaris Murry, Senior Data Curator, explains that data consumers are those who use data from Scholars. They are interested in the integrity of the data going into Scholars as well as exporting the data for reporting and websites.
• We’ve been working on improving the data loads to identify and load changes rather than loading all data every day. The publications load has been vastly improved as well as the load of manual edits. Coming up are improvements to dFac data, and grants data.
• We’ve made improvements to search data. We’re displaying data in Tableau which gives users a lot of options for searching and exporting the Scholars data. Damaris displayed the Awards & Honors view. Go to tableau.oit.duke.edu.
• Also we’ll be upgrading the Drupal module to version 8. Duke Web Services will be creating an updated module that will give users more options for pulling in data to their websites.

Development update

• Last year, we worked on improving the loads. We’ve recently made good progress with people data and grants.
• We changed the order of publication subsections.
• We ingested Bass Connections Outreach Data.
• Developers have been also working on a new front end of VIVO, the Scholars platform. More about that soon!

Road Map

• In Q1, developers will be finishing the people loads and working on importing publication citation formats from Zotero, a service that provides better formatting than Scholars currently provides
• Duke is in discussions with the VIVO community about working on a new front-end (public website) for VIVO and Scholars. These talks are still under discussion.
• Join us in April for a more complete 2019 road map!

Outreach Update

• We did office hours in Math for annual reporting.
• Lamont Cannon, Senior Outreach Coordinator, did poemwer user training and faculty consultations.
• Lamont did demos in the RCR forum, GPR’s teaching and learning program, and the DCRI. We have been promoting Scholars to grad students.
• We did a Scholars photo day in November that attracted over 240 people who got a free photo for their Scholars profile.
• Lamont does meet with individuals if they need help beyond what power users can do.
• Sixty-one percent of faculty have edited their Scholars profile since we rolled out. Five schools have more than 80% of faculty who’ve edited their Scholars profile.
• Faculty are adding lots of presentations to Scholars.

Tip of the Month

During the second week of each month, we highlight one feature and benefit. Please open it, read it, and share it with your faculty.

Questions

• My faculty member’s profile disappeared from Scholars. What do I do? Contact your dFac user to reactivate their Scholars profile – 100% of these cases are caused by faculty appointments in dFac that have expired. Be sure to ask your dFac user for the “Expired Appointments” report to see whose appointment is expiring next.
• I can’t edit someone’s name and education in Scholars. How do I change this? Work with your dFac user to update the profession names and education in dFac.
• How do I get publications recently added in Elements to appear in Scholars? Publications in Elements load to Scholars overnight. You can also manually refresh your publications in Scholars.
• Is it possible to get a list of all publications in my department in a certain date range? Yes, you can download publications from tableau.oit.duke.edu or contact the Elements team to get a report.
• How are students and faculty added to Scholars? Scholars creates profiles automatically for faculty on the first day of their primary appointment in dFac. PhD profiles are created for PhD students who are enrolled at the beginning in the fall semester. Power users can also create profiles manually.
• What happens if updates are not showing up on their department website? Check to be sure that Scholars is correctly displaying the updates and if so, contact your website administrator.

Next meeting

• Tuesday, April 2.
• We have two information sessions in February. Check the support site for more information.

User Group Meeting Presentation Link

October 2, 2018

Guest speaker: Sonja Likness, Director of Social Media and Content Strategy

• Sonja condensed her workshop, “How to build a strong online reputation” into a 30-minute presentation for the Scholars User’s Group.
• Tell your faculty why a strong online reputation is important: Make your scholarship easy to find. Boost your “Google juice” or your Google search results. Share and advance your research beyond academia (funders like this!) Help journalists find your expertise. Maintain networks with students and colleagues.
• Is there evidence that this will help you? No, this hasn’t been proven definitively, but we have anecdotal evidence that a strong online presence helps with outreach, boots speaking engagments, makes you more known with patients and partners in your field, and people looking for experts to serve on boards can more easily find you.
• Directory listings like Scholars profiles must be up to date with your up to date citations, bio and your photo. Links to videos will show the media who’s good on camera. Faculty should be speaking in a public-facing way.
• Create a Google alert using your name in quotes like “laura brinn.” Keep your Coursera profile up to date. For personal websites, you can use Duke Sites. Creating your own website is always a good idea – use your name as the website name to increase Google searches.
• LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the best social networking sites. Use the one that you think is the most fun. Create your own voice, a bit less formal since it’s public-facing. Your audiences may be at conferences so use hashtags. Content should be manageable and consistent. Share useful or entertaining content – it is not necessary for it to be your own.
• LinkedIn doesn’t require daily updates, so it’s the social network that requires least amount of time. Twitter is conversational and consistency is more important. Live-tweeting and comments are great for Twitter. Facebook can be used in interesting and cool ways. Settings are important -- you can lock it down or open it up. Blogging takes up the most time. You really need to blog regularly and publish on a regular schedule.
• As examples, Bill Boulding is very active on LinkedIn which elevates the whole Fuqua School of Business. Sara Jiang and Jenny Hoang are both Twitter superstars. Stuart Pimm is a Facebook superstar.
• Digital publishing and blogging can be done on WordPress/Sites@Duke, Medium, or Tumblr. It’s best to include images and graphics, and tell people/cross-promote your site. Link it from Twitter etc. Often written as an op-ed and written in a style that’s accessible. Medium is great for occasional blogging.
• Some faculty ask their students to contribute to their blog, like Soccer Politics.
• Video and audio can be published on Facebook Live, YouTube Live and should be timely. Left of Black started with just a webcam. Some faculty do podcasts, like Mark Goodacre’s NT Pod on iTunes. There are many ways to host podcasts.
• Make sure your info is up to date. Try blogging on Medium. Play with some social media. Experiment with audio and video. Join the communicators network by emailing Maxine Borjon.
• Go to today.duke.edu to see the Office of News and Communication’s content. Feel free to share it!

TTS Update

• Kyle Shrinak, Andy Smith and Gabe Fahl have been working hard on the Directory Tool, directorytool.trinity.duke.edu, to support information from systems of record and create consistent websites for Trinity.
• Kyle demo’ed the most common use case: adding a member. Directory Tool is particularly for creating groups. Trinity.duke.edu shows all of the groups that are useful to Trinity.
• Trinity has retired FDS although it is still being used in the Math department.
• The DT team has designated power users, similar to the Scholars power users, who have acess to the DT’s functionality.

Outreach Update for July through September

• Lamont did office hours with Nursing, in advance of their new website which links directly to Scholars profiles:
  https://nursing.duke.edu/directories/faculty
• Lamont has done many individual faculty meetings with Medicine, Nursing, and Trinity faculty. He has done demos for CFM, and Neurosurgery. Scholars attended the faculty onboarding event and the faculty tech fair.
• We’re up to 60% of profiles updated in Scholars – woot woot!

Development update
Improvements:

• The new improved publications load, with corrected display of Journal issues, has been put into production and is now much faster.
• The new SOM APT CV and NIH biosketch have been released.
• Improvements have been made for profiles that were re-activated, for example if a faculty member’s appointment lapsed.
• We created doctoral student profiles for all new PhD students.
• Added Altmetric icons to publications entity pages such as here: https://scholars.duke.edu/display/pub1326224

Bug fixes:

• Publication type “software” is now displaying correctly on profile manager.
• Profile images and overviews have been replaced for some profiles where it was missing.
• Some profiles had no widgets which has been fixed.
• Scholars report did not sort news feed items, and this is fixed.
• Some power users couldn’t reactivate profiles for non-faculty but this has been fixed.

Data Consumers update

• Infrastructure work in the form of data loads to Scholars have been benefitting the data consumers. The “data piplines” from the source system to Scholars now have a new way to identify the changes from the source systems.
• The Scholars developers have created this generic load technology that will be applied to Duke self-service data, grants, and affiliations/appointments data.
• We can update recent edits for loaded data too. We hope to add new data to Scholars in 2019 (licensure and more courses data).

For more details, see the Q4 2018 meeting presentation.

August 7, 2018

Guest speaker: Derek Jones

• The new Funding opportunity widget in MyResearchHome (mrh.duke.edu) is now in beta testing. The MRH team can give certain people access to beta widgets without giving it to everyone.
• The first time a user logs in, they set up their profile showing expertise terms. MRH consumes subject headings from the Scholars profile and and recommends keywords based on expertise keywords. Users can select all the recommended keywords or choose just a few. They can also add their own. The widget then loads recommended funding opportunities sorted by deadline. Users can “favorite” some opportunities and share them with other people – MRH sends a link to the entry in the database.
• Users can search all opportunities and choose the sources of funding opportunities to search. They can can also add a funding opportunity by submitting a title and a URL.
• Derek asked the group for two things:
  • Request early access to the widget! Derek asks for 30 minutes of your time to walk through it and you’ll get a survey to submit feedback. Contact derek.m.jones@duke.edu or go to the feedback form in MRH.duke.edu.
  • Get the word out to faculty to add their subject headings in Sholars to get a head start! They plan to launch the new widget in early October.
• The MRH team worked closely with faculty to design this widget. First, they talked to faculty about their biggest barriers to doing research at Duke and what’s hardest about getting funding. Faculty said that they don’t know what’s out there, and it’s hard to dig through and find the relevant opportunities. The MRH team mocked up a design and got feedback from the original group as well as 20 additional faculty. With a solid design, they did a focus group three times to get their feedback and make iterative changes to the widget.
• They have worked with faculty on the campus side. Everyone seems excited and finds it useful. Humanities funding opportunities are very broad so users need to enter very broad terms. Use cases for the humanities are tougher – but some of the post docs from the humanities who found this to be really useful. This will be helpful for early career faculty.

DukeSpace Update

• Paolo Mangiafico showed recent DukeSpace updates. For faculty who have submitted full text articles, they have embedded a bit about the Scholars profiles.
• Colorful badges on the left show the citation stats and the attention stats from AltMetrics. This information is hugely interesting to faculty.
• The Publication Info section on the page shows recommendations for what version of the publication to cite – the canonical version which will avoid citation dilution. The goal is for people to find and read your work.

Outreach Update for April to August

• Lamont has beeen working with DCRI, Orthopedics, Duke School of Nursing, Duke Heart Leadership Team and the CTSI. We had Scholars tables at Clinical Research Day and the Pediatrics Research Retreat.
• We conducted Doctoral Student Focus Groups to determine how to reach doctoral students and help them populate their Scholars profiles.
• We are up to 59% of total faculty profiles that have been updated. Presentations were added by both faculty and delegates more than any other data type into Scholars in Q2.
• Pageviews, total visitors and Duke Sessions have all increased in 2018 compared to the same quarter in the previous three years.

Development update
Improvements:

• Working hard on new loader functionality for pubs, grants and people.
• Use kafka message to kick off individual pubs refresh.
• Map publication relationship data.
• New home page photos
• Setup FDR load
• Finalize pub jobs and turn on RDF in test.
• New improved publications load goes live on August 8, 2018.

Bug fixes:

• Can’t add org affiliation for non-faculty from Manage Scholars Data page
• “Change preferred citation style” button not working in Scholars.
• Extra comma in the ICIME citation style.
• Open access links and button not appearing in Scholars.
• Extra characters in titles preventing pubs loads.

Data Consumers update

• Damaris Murry gave more information about the publications load improvements. She presented some stats about how much faster the publications into Scholars and into the department websites. Previously the load could take days to load a person’s data and now it takes anywhere from a few seconds to 10 minutes (for those with hundreds of publications). Now, the Scholars team can easily see the changes to publications that have been made, and can troubleshoot any problems.
• The Scholars Tableau database now shows international collaborations in the co-authors. The country codes show up on the publication. Also the ISSN for the journal has been added to Tableau.
• Foundation Relations asked us to create a new Scholars database to streamline Scholars sections to make it easier for them to identify humanities faculty expertise. That should be available soon.

Frequently-asked support questions

• Why does that photo look fuzzy? If a very small photo has been added to Scholars, it’ll be resized and shown in a larger size, which makes it look fuzzy.
• How often are awards added? We add them only once a year from Academic Analytics data who captures only national and international awards. So it’s best to add the award manually.

Road map

• We’ll be working on improving data loads all year. The pubs load improvements will go live tomorrow, August 8, 2018. The People load and Grants load improvements will be implemented before the end of the year.
• The Scholars team will be hiring a new business analyst and a communication specialist. We’ll be launching the SOM APT CV and the NIH Biosketch template.
• We’re also changing the process for creating doctoral student profiles. We will notify the DGS and DGSAs in the near future to give them the timeline and pass along a handout to give to students. This will be handy to pass along at orientation.

For more details, see the Q3 2018 meeting presentation.

Next meeting

Tuesday, October 2, 2018 at 8:30 am in A103 Erwin Mill

April 3, 2018

Guest speaker: Paolo Mangiafico

• Paolo showed the group some of the recent enhancements in DukeSpace, Duke's open access repository (they look great).
• Paolo showed us the latest features in Elements, too. For example, Elements can find author IDs in your confirmed publications and asks you to confirm them; it can find and ask you to validate your SSRN author iD, your ORCID, and any email addresses.
• Paolo went through the process of adding publication citations and full text versions of journal articles. He talked about journal articles vs. books in the open access repository; books are not always covered by Duke's Open Access policy. The Library is working to educate authors about how to protect the rights to their own work so they can use them freely. They are happy to help with individual questions at elements@duke.edu.

DukeSpace upgrades:

• The latest version version of DukeSpace includes many new features like better text snippets, more file information, responsive/mobile friendly, Altmetric data is embedded into the repository, better usage stats, more info about licenses and usage, related items, and links to Scholars and ORCID profiles. It's impressive.
• Documentation available at http://scholarworks.duke.edu/elements/help/.

Outreach Update for January to March

• Lamont did webinars for Orthopedics, and demos from Population health.
• Many faculty have been editing their activities such as committees and service to the professions. The number of pageviews and visitors to Scholars contines to increase gradually.

Development update

Improvements January – March:

• Continuing to optimize load processes, with the focus on the publications load first.
• New pubs load should go into production in about a month.

Bug fixes included:

• Problems with photos displaying after upload.
• Deleted positions were still visible.
• Problems hiding grants and displaying counts of grants in profile manager.
• Connection issues with Elements caused problems with publications load.
• Manual "in the news" items were duplicated.
• Better error message replaces the 404 message.
• Artistic role was not displaying properly.
• Campus addresses in which "Duke" was in lower case.
• "Open Access Copy" links are missing.

Data Consumers update

• Damaris Murry recommends that department websites use the Duke Web Services Drupal module because we make improvements to this module. Recently the UpdatedAt date was added to help synch data more quickly and easily.
• The Scholars team is making Scholars team available in Tableau. We showed two new views to the Scholars Steering Committee and they gave us feedback about how to display those views. Seeing that public data visualized highlights other relationships in the data which demonstrates the utility of these visualizations.
• Damaris added some new views to the public Tableau database (go to http://tableau.duke.edu) and showed how to down the data. You can also subscribe to get the new publications and artistic works sent daily or weekly in email.

Tip of the Month

• Recent tips include updating office hours, adding Artistic Works and Events, and adding Awards and Honors in Scholars.
• We now have an email list to which faculty can self-subscribe. We send communications that are relevant to faculty once a month.

Frequently-asked support questions

• "What happened to my faculty member's Scholars profile?" This is always caused because their primary appointment has expired in dFac. Contact your department's power user.
• "How do I edit a faculty member's degree and name?" Again, talk to your dFac user about getting the professional name and degree changed.
• "I recently added publications in Elements. How do I get them updated in Scholars?" Login to Profile Manager in click the Refresh button in the publications section.

Road map

• The Scholars developers will be working to improve the publications loads and all other loads for all of 2018, so major no new features are planned.

For more details, see the Q2 2018 meeting presentation.

Next meeting
Don’t forget: we have transitioned to quarterly meetings. The next Scholars user group meeting is Tuesday, August 7th at 8:30 a.m. in Erwin Mill, Bay B, Room B140.

January 9, 2018

Guest speaker: Emily Miller, Research Navigators

Research Navigator Emily Miller explained the MyResearchNavigators service, in which she and Sunita Patil help connect researchers to Duke systems and resources, funding opportunities, collaborators, and whatever they need. MyResearchNavigators has a hotline and does individual consultations in person or over the phone. Researcher onboarding, an important initiative for new faculty, helps researchers when they come to Duke. Rebecca Brower took over direction of the Research Navigators in February 2017. Many of the Research Navigators onboarding consultations referred faculty members to Lamont, who met with 36 new faculty about Scholars last year. This is a great resource for folks who are having trouble finding their way to the right research resource.

Outreach Update

In December, Lamont met with delegated in Medicine Oncology, and four faculty members in the School of Medicine. Lamont did office hours with the Math department who use Scholars for annual reporting.
Lamont did an annual assessment of Scholars usage for 2017, running through events like faculty focus group lunches, Scholars table appearances, and the testimonials. Scholars had 35% more pages viewed in 2017 than in 2016 51% more visitors, and 53% more user sessions in 2017 than 2016.

Development update
December improvements:

• There were continued improvements to the image upload process.
• We made a CV available for Linux users.
• Academic Analytics awards loaded (national and international) for 2015 and 2016.
• Bug fixes included:
• Fixed duplicate records for Academic Positions Outside of Duke on Scholars CV
• Prevented the search from returning deactivated non-faculty
• Fixed the Scholars CV, including for performances and exhibitions
• Fixed problem causing publications to be duplicated in widgets
• Widgets updating sometimes not working
• Can’t pull up names in Artistic Works Collaborators.

Data Consumers update

• Duke Web Services is working on the Drupal module, including simplifying the scholars_sync module that will allow for a full purge of synced data from within the Drupal interface. Upcoming DWS work will incorporate the updatedAt date into the sync.
• Scholars is participating in the Research Computing Symposium on January 22. There’s a visualization competition using Scholars data and doctoral committees data and we’ll share the results with this group later.
• Duke has an open Tableau server that does not require specific access but only a NetID. We are planning to make the Scholars data available on the open Tableau server. Damaris showed a Reporting Database view that enables people to download the data for their organization.
• Mentorship availability will also be available in Tableau.
• Also forthcoming is a map of education and training. It shows a global map where people graduated and there’s a date field that will enable restricting dates.
• Publications in Elements are also coming to the open server Tableau.
• The annual VIVO conference is in Durham this year so we are looking forward to hearing what others are planning to do with their VIVO implementations.

Guest speaker: Derek Jones

• Derek Jones, the product manager for MyResearchHome, did a demo and a preview of the spring release with a funding opportunities widget. Researchfunding.duke.edu shows a lot of external funding opportunities and people send internal funding opportunities as well. The new widget will recommend funding opportunities based on the user’s profile. Users’ Scholars subject headings appear on their MRH funding profile and can be used in the funding opportunity search. After the widget finds opportunities, faculty can give a thumbs up or thumbs down which will contribute to the machine’s learning of appropriate opportunities.
• Users can add funding opportunities to display to researchers via this widget and ORS gets notified.  Others who support researchers also have access to the widget and can set up multiple profiles for multiple researchers.
• Derek wants to present to all faculty meetings around March and April. Please contact him to set up a meeting for your faculty.

Elements 5.8
There’s a new version of Elements that doesn’t have a lot of new visible features but provides new features for administrators. Elements has the Modern Language Association as a source now which has better coverage for the humanities.
Be sure that your faculty have a Scopus ID entered into Elements to enable auto-claiming. Elements facilitates this for faculty as well.

Road map
The Scholars developers will be working to improve the publications loads and all other loads for all of 2018, so no new features are planned. We’ll be fixing bugs as well. More details on that later.

Next meeting
Don’t forget: we’re moving to quarterly meetings. The next Scholars user group meeting is Tuesday April 3 at 8:30 in Erwin Mill bay A room 103.

December 5, 2017

Outreach Update

• In November, Lamont did demos with Orthopedics, Thomson Writing Program, Nicholas, and Medical Oncology.

• We hosted a table at the NextEd fest.

• We showed the new Scholars digital signage to highlight testimonials from our project champions. We will be showing these on monitors throughout campus and the medical center.

• Metrics: the traffic to the public Scholars site has increased steadily this fall, for pageviews and sessions overall as well as at Duke. Compared to the same month in the past three years, increases have been significant.

• Faculty have been updating the new Performances, Exhibitions and Screenings data fields over the past month. This section was edited more than any other section.

• Over the previous 12 months, over 50% of Pratt and Nicholas faculty edited their profiles, and overall, 23% of faculty updated their profiles in the last year.

Development update

• Primary, the new Scholars Basic CV is live in production now. This includes the new data fields to support the complete CV. The SoM APT CV is almost ready.

• Fixes: a help tag was added, the Professional Training capitalization was fixed, dates for Exhibitions were added. There was a major Scholars bug in October that affected data for all of November. The photo recrop was very slow, new faculty didn’t have widgets, there was a strange endYear value, duplicate phone numbers on the profile, update the casing of manual keywords. Most significantly, lots of duplicate publications occurred for about 5% of people, widgets weren’t updating and broken image links were appearing in Scholars.

• November was a difficult month for us. The problems really underscore the need for the infrastructure and loads work that is planned for 2018.

Road map

• We will be working on a pilot phase for the SOM APT CV with the department of Medicine. We are not planning any new enhancements in Scholars for the next 12 months.

Communications

• Tip of the month: how to add five – 20 subject headings to your profile, including how to request new subject headings that are not available in MeSh and Library of Congress vocabularies.
• The “Did You Know?” email showed how to use the Scholars report to copy link-free content from your Scholars profile to a Word document or any other destination. This report could be helpful for faculty who are preparing an annual report.
• These emails will be on our support site going forward.

Questions

• I have two PhD students with deactivated profiles. Can I get them reactivated? Yes—Power Users can reactivate those. Go to Manage Scholars Data, search for the person, click the Edit Profile link and on their profile, click the Activate button to re-activate a profile.

• Note that once a profile is created, it takes awhile for the profile to be indexed. It may take a few hours or overnight for this to happen.

• For our faculty, what is the logistical support structure for Scholars? First, contact your power user. If the power user can’t resolve the problem, they should check the Support page. If the answer is not available or if the problem is thought to be a system bug, then please submit a Help ticket. Be sure to describe the problem completely. Power users should report the problem and the resolution to their faculty.

• Is there a single location to find information about systems issues and problems, as well as resolutions? On the Home page, click the “Read Updates From the Scholars Team” link.

Next meeting

• Tuesday January 9 at 8:30 in Erwin Mill bay A room 103.

 

November 7, 2017

Outreach Update

• October was a busy month! Lamont met with ten new faculty members in Medicine and Nursing. He trained an Engineering power user in addition to regularly scheduled training.
• Fall promotion is happening now to increase awareness of Scholars campus-wide. New digital signage is going out soon.
• Lamont has done info tables in multiple locations around campus, including on Family Day, and we a table at OIT Faculty Tech day at the TEC center.
• If you have time on your faculty meeting agenda, call us to come present to your faculty.

Development update

• The Scholars development team is working on both CVs: the Scholars (generic) CV and the SOM APT CV, which is a specific template for the APT committee.
• Widgets: we recently added start and end dates to appointments and added the medical licensure date. We put in a fix that caused some missing appointments in widgets.
• Lots of issues with photos recently were caused by multiple failures: problems with the servers, the recrop feature was really slow, we had problems restoring images, we are cleaning up bad data created during the conversion of non-faculty identifier. Some of these are still in progress but most are resolved.

Other miscellaneous fixes that are in place (already complete):

• Improved the error message that appears when someone doesn’t have a profile.
• Added Scholarly Society to Awards and Honors
• Cleanup display of professional activities
• Filter out pubs with blank titles on the Research page
• Created new profiles for grad students in A&S

Road map

• We are currently planning the implementation of both new CVs. The Scholars/generic CV will go into production soon, released quietly so that we don’t confuse our SOM users who are looking forward to the SOM CV. We are working with the APT office to determine the best strategy for rolling out the CV. We will likely start with a pilot phase for volunteer faculty.

Communications

• The Tip of the Month email comes to power users and communicators monthly to provide ways to maximize your use of Scholars. October’s tip explained how to add web links to your Scholars profile. Please be on the lookout for your Tip of the Month!
• The Did You Know email is intended to spread the word about little-used features in Scholars. In October, we talked about how to check your data analytics in Scholars.

Support questions of the month:

• How do you create non-faculty profiles? Power users can click “Manage Scholars Data” on the Home page and create the profile by selecting a person and an organizational affiliation.
• If a faculty member has a temporary title is there a way to display a permanent title on their profile? No, unfortunately, Duke’s policy prevents the permanent title from being displayed publically until it is completely approved.

Other Questions

• Is there a way to edit non-faculty titles instead of the HR titles? Unfortunately, there isn’t a way at this time. Adding “working title” functionality was discussed with the HR and SAP teams but was not continued.
• Are the data sections the same for non-faculty as for faculty? Yes, except for the faculty data from dFac does not get populated for non-faculty. So it’s important to add education and training history into the Overview section.
• Will A&S be working with you guys on a CV that can be used for annual reporting? We have not been asked by A&S. Please tell your faculty to check out the Scholars CV and the Scholars report as was to pull data from their Scholars profiles for annual reporting.
• When grad students profiles are being created, is there any way to pull photos from SISS? This is possible, and we’d love to get more info from SISS. Doing so is not on the road map, but the project sponsors and advisory groups have been discussing ways to improve curation and oversight for doctoral students profiles in Scholars.

Next meeting
Tuesday December 5 at 8:30 in Erwin Mill bay A room 103.

September 5, 2017

Outreach Update

• Over the summer, the Scholars team focused on engaging School of Medicine faculty, starting with an event for power users and business managers. In August, we sent all SOM departments a usage report showing which faculty have been using Scholars, which faculty profiles have been getting the most pageviews, and how to improve engagement for your faculty.
• Scholars had a table at the new University faculty onboarding event.
• We did onsite training in Anesthesiology, Community and Family Medicine and faculty demos in DHVI and Ophthalmology.
• Lamont has done many individual training meetings with faculty in August.
• Usage metrics have increased again in August for both Duke sessions and total pageviews, which has almost doubled since August 2015.
• Faculty and delegates have been adding awards and honors more than other data over the summer as well as overviews and photos.

Development Update

• The developers are working on adding the new data sections, released in July, available via the widgets.
• They have begun working on the CV generation tools.
• Title precedent logic has been tweaked to ensure that the preferred title matches what’s displayed in Duke Directory.
• Bug fixes include a fix to some photos loading in rotated 90 degrees, problems with grants load, and random problems with photos.

Guest Speaker

• Damaris Murry presented an update for data consumers, who are the contacts for websites that consume Scholars data.
• The Tableau support group has provided a Duke Community server for anyone with a Duke ID. The Tableau Duke Community server offers public data from Duke systems, and we will publish Scholars data on this Duke Community server. This would enable users to download Scholars data as a CSV.
• The Data Consumer’s Group meets quarterly but we are seeing more overlap between the power users and the data consumers. We encourage power users who are also responsible for websites that consume Scholars data to subscribe to the Data Consumer’s list.

Special Segment: Is troubleshooting Scholars@Duke a challenge?

• If Scholars data is not loading on your website (when it’s supposed to), there are steps you can take to troubleshoot the problem and figure out what’s happening.
• Check Scholars first, and then check the widgets. If the data in the widgets matches what’s in Scholars, then the problem lies in the data synch from the widgets to your websites.

Communications

• The Scholars Support page has been redesigned and we’d like to get your feedback. If you’d like to participate in usability testing of the Support page, please let us know.

Road Map

• In October, we’ll be rolling out the new data sections to the widgets and to the basic CV. We’ll also be making the new School of Medicine APT CV available this fall.

Next Meeting

• Tuesday, October 3, at 8:30 a.m. in Erwin Mill, Room A103.

 

August 8, 2017

Outreach Update

• The School of Medicine Power User and Business Manager event on July 12 was well-attended. The Scholars team invited the group to tell us how things are going with Scholars and to share their ideas for improving communications to faculty.
• We discussed adding a faculty email notification list that would let faculty opt-in to info about Scholars—this list is coming soon.
• We've been doing meetings with the Research Navigators and onboarding meetings.
• One on one meetings with faculty are ongoing, as usual.
• User metrics: bounce rates are going down, which means that users are spending more time on Scholars. Faculty and delegates continue to edit photos and overviews, while delegates are editing presentations and service.
• Scholars top three sources of traffic are google (45% of users come from google), bing and yahoo. Users are not always starting at the Scholars home page but coming from a profile page which was found by one of the new search results sites.

Development Update

• Profile Manager was implemented two weeks ago,
• Existing artistic events migrated to the new "performance" structure.
• Bug fixes include improving the switch from non-faculty to faculty, phone number not appearing for students, subject headings loading into Profile Manager but not on the profile, and multiple affiliations appearing in PM but not on the profile.

Guest Speaker

• Paolo Mangiafico spoke about the features in Elements which will be upgraded on Friday, August 11. Some things in Elements may be working more slowly than usual over the weekend but should be fine on Monday morning.
• New features include a search for publications that match on unique identifiers by looking for these IDs in your accepted publications and your Duke email address. These publications will be automatically approved. This process will help but not eliminate problems with authors with common names. If you reject an identifier, Elements will automatically reject these publications.
• In the publications tab, you'll see a list of identifiers that might be yours. Users can say yes, no or ignore for each ID. For all of these, you can automatically claim or suggest these IDs. More info will be displayed based the IDs.
• Click "Manage all identities" to see any other IDs that might be out there to identify him. You can also add other IDs and other email addresses to automatically approve other publications.
• Remaining pending publications are those that did not match any pending IDs. Note that this process improves matching publications but it is not 100% guaranteed. Faculty with older publications might not be found in the bibliographic databases. Publications imported manually may not match titles from bibliographic databases. Some sources have been added recently but not retroactively. So some manual editing may still be required.
• For the humanities faculty, the MLA database does not track affiliations in their records, but only by name. So if you're Jane Smith, the MLA database can't tell that you're the Jane Smith from Duke. Also MLA wants the full name rather than first initial plus last name. The MLA source is not automatically turned on yet but can be activated for individuals by emailing the Elements team at elements@duke.edu.

More about Profile Manager 1.1

• Lamont talked about the new data fields in PM 1.1 including appointment history, Research Interests, Clinical Activities, Artistic Events have been migrated to the new Exhibitions, Screenings and Performances section. Check it out in Scholars@Duke!

Communications

• Users may notice a change in the communications from Scholars. We are sending more frequent communications in more graphical format with links to additional information. We're active on Twitter as well.
• Thanks to Mitch Melkonian for his creativity and hard work with these new communications! If you've missed them, go out on Twitter to see our old tweets.

Usage Reports

• We will be sending out emails to each of the department business managers and power users with breakdown of which faculty have edited what data on their profiles,

Questions

• Will the CV be downloadable in PDF or Word? Right now it's available in Word but it's easy to Save to PDF or Print to PDF in Word.

Road Map

• Next work includes adding new data sections to the widgets and creating the new School of Medicine APT CV.

Next Meeting

• Tuesday, September 5th, the day after Labor Day.

 

July 11, 2017

Outreach Update

• Lamont did an update for the DCRI delegates group to show them new features like Profile Manager. The delegates maintain DCRI Elements publications and Scholars profiles on behalf of the DCRI faculty.
• Julia and Lamont did an overview for a group from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County who visited Duke to learn more about collaborative scholarship. UMBC has been working on a research networking/discovery system.
• Usage metrics showed Scholars visits decreased slightly over the last month which often happens during summer months. Bounce rates (users who leave a page quickly) has decreased a bit, which suggests that more visitors are spending time on pages. Also, more search engines are picking up Scholars profiles, and analytics show that more search engines are sending more visitors to Scholars from bing, yahoo and others in addition to google.

Development Update

• Developers recently completed a big effort to convert non-faculty profile identifiers from NetID to Duke ID. This led to some cleanup work on department websites that link to non-faculty profiles. Scholars data consumers were notified in advance.
• Developers have been working on Scholars v1.1 which adds data sections to support a complete CV.
• The following bugs were recently fixed: “Faculty member” appears next to name on some profiles, organization widget data did not refresh immediately, the LOC subject heading search failed, descriptions on awards page didn’t display, overnight publication loads were refreshing some recent publications.
• Note: publication loads are continuously running, so they don’t just load overnight. Sometimes there are so many publications that the loads get behind and publications take more than 24 hours to load; in these cases, just wait another day or so or refresh the publications manually. (Improving the publication loads is a task that we return to continually. New functionality in the Elements API will help us improve the pubs loads further.)
• Haley told us about an upgrade to the DukeSpace repository so the interface for uploading faculty papers will look a little different. There were lots of deposits after the Elements email notifications were sent in June, but not as many in July.

Road Map

• Scholars 1.1: available on Tuesday, July 24
• Adding new data to Search and widgets
• Updated CV and School of Medicine APT CV

Discussions

• Power users: know your web developer! If your organization feeds Scholars data to your website, it’s important for power users to pass along technical information to the website developers, particularly those who are vendors. We will be adding contacts to the Scholars Data Consumers email list. Scholars@Duke and Elements
• What’s the most frequent question that faculty ask about Scholars@Duke? They usually ask how often publications get refreshed.
• How many of your faculty are unfamiliar with Scholars? More of them know about Scholars if the school or department website feeds Scholars data.
• Users report that the Research Navigators have been very helpful for pointing faculty members to Scholars and other resources for researchers. For more information, see https://www.ctsi.duke.edu/resources-duke-investigators/myresearchnavigators

 

May 2, 2017

Outreach Update

• In April, we hosted an information table in Perkins. We demo’ed new Profile Manager to Romance Studies, History and Divinity.
• Lamont also met with individual faculty members.
• Visitor sessions were up slightly in May, and faculty members edited mostly Professional Activities, overviews and photos.
• The Medical School site is Scholars’ biggest referral site, with the lowest bounce rate and the highest number of pages per session. (Thanks, medschool.duke.edu!)

Development Update

• Add new fields to Profile Manager to support the complete CV, research interests, teaching activities, employment history.
• Deleted subject headings, artistic works, professional activities that were previously hidden.
• Corrected bug associated with editing multiple types in Artistic Works.
• Updated Artistic Works entity page.
• Removed counter from Description fields.

Road Map
Tasks planned for the next few months (through September):

• Roll out new data fields in Profile Manager (see above)
• Update the basic CV and create a School of Medicine CV
• Convert non-faculty profiles from NetID to DukeID as the identifier.

Guest Speaker

• Derek Jones, Product Manager for MyResearchHome presented the new “Find a Collaborator” widget. This widget enables users to find people in Scholars using a keyword, name, or topic. The widget produces the same results as the people tab in Scholars search.
• Derek also introduced some of the other widgets and talked about the overall purpose of MRH: to provide a portal to helpful research tools and websites for Duke researchers. 
• They have over 4K users, 65% SoM, 10 A&S some humanities users, about 55% staff and 45% faculty. 
• We have discussed ways to consume Scholars data to make the portal more relevant, such as tailoring the portal based on their Scholars keywords, and we hope to look at this functionality in the future. But first, the research administrator portal is being integrated with MRH. So there will be more tools for administrators like budget development available in MRH. 

Questions

• Can you impersonate others in MRH? There’s no way to do that but they will probably add that in the future, particularly if for the research administrator portal.
• Do you get requests for functionality or features that are not workable or right for MRH? Yes, for example, departments have requested department-specific announcements. There may be a way to do that, but the MRH team is also concerned about providing too many widgets and cluttering up the landscape. 
• Do you have gaps for institutional data – challenges? They are able to patch together data from many systems and get what they need. One problem is identifying staff who work on research. Another is getting data about core labs/shared resources, etc. There are a lot of new systems coming online over the next year that should provide enhanced research data.

Next meeting

• June 6, 2017

 

February 7, 2017

Outreach Update

• Scholars communications reboot: recently we’ve been emailing power users and communicators more frequently. Lamont introduced Mitch Melkonian who’s helping with publications and communications.
• Scholars visualization challenge: Damaris Murry introduced the contest at the Research Computing Symposium. We will be publicizing these entries soon.
• Faculty focus group lunches: We had four days of faculty focus group lunches and got feedback from ~20 faculty members.
• Scholars information table at Perkins library: hosted once a month.
• Information session held for Orthopaedics faculty and delegates.

Development Update

• Continued development of new Profile Manager
• Added help text to new Search results page
• Bug fixes in progress for the 503 proxy error received by SoM users, organizations pages not accessible occasionally. These are both related to the additional data load in Scholars.

Road Map

• Scheduled/in progress:
  • Profile manager for existing data entry fields available mid-April
  • Profile manager for new data entry fields available early June
  • Add data to widgets and update CVs
• Background/concurrent tasks:
  • Convert from NetID to Duke ID for non-faculty profiles before July 1
• New Elements version put in production on February 20. To get a preview, see the test system at dev.elements@duke.edu.
• The Elements notifications will be set up to run for Arts and Sciences faculty on March 1. These will be sent to all faculty who have any pending publications.

Questions

• A power user asked why use Scholars if their profiles aren’t appearing in Google. Lamont explained that we recently improved search engine optimizations. Linking to faculty profiles will help improve the Google searches.
• How do other users deal with adjunct profiles? Do others curate these profiles or not? Nicholas says that they focus on the adjuncts that teach. Psychiatry treats all of their faculty the same, regardless of their rank.
• Will the team science tool be available for other schools? If you have ideas for displaying Scholars data on your school or department site, please let us know!

See you next time!

 

January 3, 2017

Short WebEx meeting due to many individuals out for the holidays. Happy New Year!

 

December 7, 2016
Road Map
Scheduled/in progress:

• Profile Manager redesign (release planned for late January)
• SoM APT CV template  (release planned for late January)

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Search 1.1 enhancements

Development Update

• We’ve been working on the following;
• Created non-faculty profiles for new Trinity A&S graduate students
• Implemented collapsible filters in the mobile view
• Indexed artistic work events (name, venue, and description)
• Added two Professional Activities attributes to index
• Fixed a couple of bugs with subject headings and a bug with grant start dates

Guest Speaker

• Haley Walton from the Libraries showed us the new version of Elements 5 which is in the development system at dev.elements.duke.edu.  Elements 5 has most of the same features currently in production (elements.duke.edu) but it’s been re-organized to simplify the user experience. Any information added to Dev Elements will not be carried to the production system, so don’t spend a lot of time adding publications to Dev Elements.
• Two identifiers, the Scopus ID and the ORCiD, help correctly identify authors’ publications. Haley showed how to look up the Scopus author ID in scopus.com and then enter that Scopus ID into Elements. You will need to verify a publication for that person. Entering a Scopus ID into Elements enables publications from Scopus to be approved and thus loaded into Scholars without a faculty member’s approval.
• Version 5 of Elements also matches on an email address, so if someone publishes with their Duke email address, those will be found by the searches and will suggest those as Pending  publications.
• Haley demonstrated the simplified workflow for depositing full-text versions of publications from the arXiv archive and from European PubMed. Depositing those PDF versions of publications makes them accessible to the public in Scholars via a button called “Open Access Copy.”
• Remember that Duke’s Open Access policy is intended to make Duke scholarship available to the global community which is particularly important for underserved communities who don’t have resources for subscriptions to journals or databases.

Outreach Update

• We’ve been doing demos of the new features in Scholars (search, Profile Manager redesign and CV updates) and will continue those in January and February.
• User metrics show that in 2016, the School of Medicine had the highest percentage of profiles edited since rollout: 40% compared to 26% of profiles edited at the end of 2015. In 2016, 23% of faculty profiles in the School of Medicine were edited and 35 % of profiles in Trinity A&S were edited.

Questions

• Q: "How can TTS better keep up with new development such as the creation of grad student profiles?" A: We will be meeting soon about communications, so we can discuss that.
• Q: "It’s frustrating to offer help to faculty and not have anyone accept. Any thoughts?" A: We have metrics that show who has not logged into Scholars over a time period. The Elements team can show you how to run a report on who has and has not logged into Elements. This will be a future topic for the Scholars user’s group meeting.

Next Meeting

• January 3, 2017 (this might be a webex meeting)

 

November 1, 2016

Road Map

Scheduled/in progress:

• Profile Manager redesign
• Additions to CV templates
• Rolling out new Profile Manager and CVs in January

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Search version 1.1

Development Update

• New enhanced Search went live in Scholars last week.
• Development team has been focused on Advanced Search and Profile Manager redesign
• Bug fixes: books not linked, problems with non-faculty moving to faculty and vice versa.

Demo

• Lamont showed the group the new Scholars search results functionality and demonstrated how it displays results in tabs.

Elements Update

• The new version of Elements is still upcoming but not yet scheduled. Next month, new email notifications may be going out for new schools.

Next Meeting

• December 6, 2016

 

October 10, 2016

Welcome New Power Users!
Today’s meeting was a special event for new Scholars@Duke power users. We went through the history of the Faculty Data Project, the goals of Scholars@Duke, and the benefits of Scholars@Duke for faculty and for Duke as a whole.
Lamont reviewed the role of the Power User:

• Act as the liaison between your department and the Scholars team
• Answer basic questions about Scholars and Elements
• Share information about Scholars and Elements with your faculty, and share feedback from faculty and other users.

Support model: we rely on the power user to answer questions locally and to stay in the loop on questions to the Scholars team from your faculty members.
We reviewed the Support page and how to get help (email scholars@duke.edu).

Scholars Promotion Week

• During the week of October 17 – 21, we’ll be promoting Scholars@Duke.
• New features demo in Duke Medicine Pavilion
• Scholars information table at Perkins Library on Tuesday and Friday from 11 - 1
• Scholars flyer on building monitors throughout Duke
• After that week, we will be demoing the new features in a different building every week through the end of the semester (see the Information Sessions page).
• Lamont also went over the processes for creating profiles for non-faculty such as students and post docs.

Open Forum

• Kyle Skrynak addressed the Trinity users in the group. Email tts-websys-projects@duke.edu if you have questions about your department's website.

Next Meeting 

• Tuesday, November 1 in Erwin Mill A103

 

September 6, 2016

Outreach Update

• Lamont met with many faculty in A&S, in person and remotely, which is convenient for many foks.
• Lamont also met again with the delegate group from DCRI.
• Reminder: make sure your teaching faculty update their office hours in Scholars!

Usage Metrics

• Visitors have increased in August over July; externally we have 30% more visitors and internally there are 50% more visitors from Duke.
• Faculty are editing professional activities, photos and overviews. Delegates are adding photos and overviews.
• More users are creating a link to their CV stored on Box or elsewhere.
• The Medical School website is referring more users than any other site, followed by search.duke.edu and medicine.duke.edu.

We have four Scholars information sessions this month. See Information Sessions on the Support page.

Development Update

• Search and Profile Manager were our big tasks for development in August.
• We’re also working on an enhanced CV including a template for the School of Medicine APT process.
• Also the developers worked with the new DukeToday site; now, links to DukeToday stories go directly to DukeToday without an intermediary link.
• Added public image name and modification time to widgets. These attributes show when the image changed. See the Data Consumer’s Guide on the Scholars Support page for more information.

Road Map

• Advanced Search: in production mid-October
• Profile Manager redesign: in production mid-November
• Enhanced CV and School of Medicine APT CV: in production early January 2017

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Add profiles for students: first week in October

Questions

• Can we stream these meetings? Yes, we can certainly do that perhaps using WebEx.
• Regarding office hours, if they are updated in Scholars@Duke, will they updated in the department webpage? For Trinity department sites, that should be working. Kyle will be verifying that.
• For people who are both staff and student, which is the preferred phone number? Scholars loads that information from the Enterprise Directory, so whatever is displayed there is what displays in Scholars. For more information, please contact the Enterprise Directory team.

Next Meeting

• Tuesday, October 4 at 8:30 in Erwin Mill Bay A room 103. Special welcome for new power users, with biscuits!

 

August 2, 2016

Outreach Update

• Lamont has been meeting with individually with faculty members and power users and delegates.
• We’re now offering information sessions (training) in the School of Medicine, so there are two per month for the next semester.
• We have about twice as many sessions per month now as we did in 2014. Lamont is working in Google Analytics and is collecting information about user behavior before we implement the new changes in the next few months.

Development Update
The following items went into production in July:

• Previously, when a person changed one publication changed, all of their pubs were reloaded. Now, only the pubs that changed are reloaded. The load is much faster now!
• Customized aliases for the URL
• New Elements hosting site (cloud-based)
• Emeriti can’t be added as non-faculty
• Final SEO tasks
• A number of widget additions

Road Map

Scheduled/In Progress:

• Profile Manager Redesign
• Complete CV from Scholars data
• Advanced Search

Guest speaker

• Rebecca Brouwer and Johanna O’Dell showed us MyResearchHome (mrh.duke.edu). They started with a funny promotional video on youtube (search for MyResearchHome on YouTube).
• Login to mrh.duke.edu – the first time, you get info about how you’re involved in research at Duke. You can customize the widgets as you’d like: Links, Applications, Announcements, Projects, Training, Resources & Services, Projects showing balance of current research fund codes, eIRB.
• Future development includes implementing notifications and alerts, and more integration with Scholars to pull information about research interests to further customize the opportunities.
• Rebecca is looking for people to give feedback on development, so get in touch with her if you’d like to get involved. They will be doing a lot of presentations at faculty meetings. Also contacting communicators, DukeToday stories, and other faculty events.
• Paolo Mangiafico gave a brief demo of the new version of Elements in the test system, dev.elements.duke.edu.

Next Meeting

• Tuesday, September 6 (day after Labor Day) at 8:30 in Erwin Mill Bay A room 103.

 

July 5, 2016

Outreach Update

• Lamont did power user training in Community and Family Medicine and DCRI in June; CFM has appointed a lot of delegates, many of whom are staff assistants who work with faculty already.
• We did a faculty and staff demo in Surgery, which is rolling out a new departmental website using Scholars data.
• External visitors to Scholars were down slightly in June.
• Most edits to Scholars include professional activities, photos and overviews.
• Next Scholars Info Session is Thursday, 7/21 at 11 at Oregon St. There will also be an Info Session somewhere in a School of Medicine location.

Development Update

• Profile Manager redesign and Search are the major development tasks last month.
• Publications load updates have been put into production.
• Problem with non-faculty profiles have been resolved.
• Feeding data into Tableau: this is complete but may require additional tweaks.
• SEO optimizations, robots.txt: this work has been finalized.
• Preferred citation formats in widgets has been improved.
• Bug with CMYK format photos has not been fixed but the error message is much better and explains the problem to users.

Road Map

• Scheduled/In Progress:
  • Advanced Search
  • Profile Manager redesign
  • Complete CV
• Background/concurrent tasks:
  • Planning visualizations
  • Convert non-faculty to DUIDs
  • Tableau dashboards, productivity of grants and publications.

One of our developers, Danielle Heckman, is leaving Duke in August, so we will need to revisit our schedule for rolling out the major new features this fall.
Questions

• Does bounce rate include visitors who click links to the departmental website, lab page or department site? Yes, if visitors do that within 10 seconds or so.
• Could you do a visualization to be used for annual reporting? Such as publications by type, compared to previous years? Kyle suggested that we look at what was used in FDS for annual reporting.
• Can we offer a medium-sized photo, something bigger than the thumbnail but smaller than the full-size photo? We don’t have plans to do that but ONC has requested that we use standard-sized photos. We can follow up with them.
• How to inform clinical faculty about Scholars? There was a suggestion to add more info to the DMR material, so we’ll follow up on that!

Next Meeting

• Tuesday, August 2, 2016

 

June 7, 2016

Outreach Update

• In May, Lamont has worked with Germanic Languages faculty and brought on many new power users and delegates.
• We met with the School of Medicine Communicators and hosted a table at Clinical Research Day.
• Our total visitors and Duke visitors decreased slightly in May but the internal bounce rate improved slightly for May.
• Regarding usage metrics, faculty and delegates are updating professional activities and photos more than any other information in Profile Manager.

Communication Plan

• To prepare for the new Scholars features in the fall and ensure that all Scholars users are properly informed, we are planning a number of events and communications and need to get power users feedback.
• The week after fall break, October 17 - 21, we'll be promoting Scholars in all schools with Duke Today story and other communications and events.
• In the following weeks, we'll be holding demos across Duke. Please communicate those to your faculty. If you'd like us to attend faculty meetings, just email us at scholars@duke.edu
• We sent an updates document in May to all communicators. Not all power users saw the email or got this information, so we will re-evaluate our communication strategy going forward.

Development Update

In May, the following development tasks went into production:

• Search engine optimizations, profile aliases
• Open access URL added to widgets
• Fixed inconsistencies in styling of citations.

Richard demo’ed the new Search page, which is a preliminary version of the Advanced Search that will be available in the fall.

Road Map

Scheduled/In Progress:

• Advanced Search
• Profile Manager Redesign
• Publications load improvements

We’ll be working on education records in dFac in preparation for the SACS accreditation process. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Dale LaPointe.

TTS Updates

• In June, TTS will be loading only data from Scholars into A&S websites. Ed Gomes recommends that users don’t spend any more time in FDS because they won’t be loading that data soon.
• Also TTS is managing in a separate tool those faculty affiliations / memberships to the informal organizations such as labs and programs.
• Send questions to tts-websys-projects if you have questions about your Scholars data on your department page. But if you see the same problem in Scholars and you don’t know how to fix it, email scholars@duke.edu.

Elements Update

• In the next few weeks, Elements will be hosted from a different location so hopefully this move will be transparent to users or at worse, could affect Elements availability for a short time.
• Paolo would like to encourage other schools to activate Elements notifications; the emails have been very successful in the School of Medicine.

Questions

• How many faculty do we think have never heard of Scholars? Can we contact people who have never edited their profiles?  Yes, we can identify faculty who have never edited their profiles. If you’d like a report of this information, please email us at scholars@duke.edu.
• Power users, did you get an email with Scholars updates? Many power users did not get this email. We will be talking again with school communicators to determine the best way to keep faculty informed about new features in Scholars.
• What’s the best way to entice faculty to attend demos of new features? Ideas include getting power users to help publicize the meetings, try to schedule at least one demo per building, ask the dean to send the invitation, and hold repeated opportunities throughout the pre-annual report processes (October, November, December). Also we welcome the chance to attend departmental faculty meetings.
• What is the number next to the Search result? That’s the relevance number to show how well the result matches to the search criteria. We will be testing this to see if it’s helpful or not, so we may adjust this number.
• What’s the timing of the data loads? Those of us who are consuming data need information about how quickly the data loads from the source system to Scholars. People are concerned about lag time after they edit their site.
• Can we have a message in Profile Manager to let folks know how long it will take for updates to appear on their profiles? Great idea!

Next Meeting

• July 5, 2016 *may be rescheduled, so check back to make sure!

 

May 2, 2016

Demo: Adding Author IDs to Elements

• Paolo Mangiafico demo’d how to find an author’s Scopus ID in Scopus and enter it into Elements. He also talked about ORCID, the open researcher and contributer ID which is designed to create unique IDs for everyone in the reseach community. Adding the ORCID will automatically add publications that authors have added to their ORCID profiles. For more information, and a video, see https://scholarworks.duke.edu/elements/help/modifying-search-settings/
• Elements will be down for an hour as we migrate the host to Symplectic sometime in the next couple of weeks.
• Elements v5 is currently in the development environment, dev.elements.duke.edu. The user interface looks quite a bit different but the same menu commands are available in a different layout. This new version will go to production later in the summer. Power users will be notified when the upgrade happens and additional training resources will be available to help with the transition.
• Elements notifications have been very successful in the SoM. Emails go out monthly from the system to all faculty who have any pending publications in Elements. Lots of faculty are taking this opportunity to update their publications, with very few objections. Paolo is encouraging other schools to turn on these Elements notifications for their faculty.

Status of FDS

Kyle Skrinak explained that their website work entails a transition from Apostrophe to Drupal as well as from FDS to Scholars. Currently, FDS is still available in view-only mode but faculty cannot edit their FDS profiles, and all website information currently comes from Scholars@Duke. He went through common questions about the transition. They are pulling publications from Scholars using the preferred citation format.

Outreach Update

• Lamont and Haley have been meeting individually with faculty members and note that many people prefer to meet one-on-one.
• Lamont did four, half-day sessions with the History department which were scheduled following a faculty meeting which worked out well.
• Lamont did a training session with DCRI delegates. DCRI will be loading Scholars data to their website so they are asking their faculty to check their Scholars profiles.
• Scholars training locations may move around a bit during the summer so be sure to check the training page!

Development Update
Recent additions now in production:

• Search Engine Optimizations will display Scholars profiles higher in Google searches results.
• SEO sitemap nearly complete
• Readable Scholars URLs, such as “scholars.duke.edu/person/iain.sanderson” uses email alias and can be customized by users.
• “Missing grants” links have been corrected.
• Widgets - Add open access URL to the publication attribute
• Orphaned data cleanup

Tasks in development:

• Advanced Search to simplify combining search terms with operators (e.g. and, not, or). Tabbed search results according to type.
• Profile Manager redesign: developers are creating a new development structure for the new version
• Scholars data in Tableau for dashboards and reports
• More improvements to widgets—add ways to trigger widget refresh automatically.
• Improvements to publication load
• Allow multiple links for an artistic work
• Planning out how to move forward with profile manager updates
• Improvements to Elements load of publications into Scholars

Road Map
Scheduled/In Progress:

• Profile Manager Redesign/Complete CV
• Advanced Search Dialog and faceted search results results
• Feed widgets data to Tableau for dashboards and reporting

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Add non-faculty courses
• Enable multiple links to an artistic work/non-print media
• Link and style the countries for Global Scholarship

Questions

• Q: "Do you offer webinars instead of training?" A: No but that’s something that we’d like to offer. The group decided that a couple of presentations of about 15 minutes in length would be ideal.
• Q: "Does the Scholars team get involved in onboarding activities to familiarize new faculty with Scholars and Elements?" A: We do not as a rule because onboarding is typically done at the school level. However, discussions are underway to provide a Provost-office level onboarding event, and if that happens, we hope that Scholars will be involved.

Next Meeting

• June 7, 8:30 am in Erwin Mill 103A

 

April 5, 2016

Outreach Update

Lamont held department meetings with three groups and training continues. Individual and group updates are working really well for faculty members and continues to help make them feel more confident about the updating tasks. Please let us know if you'd like to schedule a meeting about Scholars@Duke!

Development Update

• Subject headings improvements are in production (see Demo section)
• Updated date in the widgets makes it easy to see which individuals have changed (however, we are still working on improvements to the widgets data as some people are not getting refreshed data in the widgets)
• Orphan data, leftover when people leave, will be cleaned out and this improvement will be in production soon
• Named professorships are now associated with the primary appointment organization

Road Map

Significant tasks scheduled/in progress:

• Advanced Search/tabbed results
• Profile Manager redesign

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Search engine optimizations: create alias for profile URLs/redirect
• Add non-faculty courses
• Feed widgets data to Tableau
• Link core and mini grants
• Link countries data from Geographical Focus
• Finish SEO tasks

Going forward, we will demo major changes at the User’s Group meeting before we communicate the changes via the Power User listserv.

Demo

To improve subject headings in Scholars: we started with a mass “hide” of subject headings for faculty who have not edited their automatically-generated subject headings. In phase 2, we have created an additional Duke vocabulary for subject headings that are not found in either Library of Congress or MeSH. New terms can be requested and will be curated by the Scholars team. We’ve also improved the search to find more related terms rather than only exact matches. We’ll write up a summary of these new features and send it to the power user list.

FDS Update

Ed Gomes gave a summary of the work that TTS has done to transition department websites to use data from FDS to Scholars. TTS has done a tremendous amount of work to help support faculty who haven’t transported their information in FDS to Scholars. FDS does not enable faculty to edit this information but they can view it. FDS now shows data that’s only in FDS, or only in Scholars, or both. Additionally, TTS is transitioning the departmental website platform from Apostrophe to Drupal. Some departments websites are in Apostrophe and some are in Drupal, so the display is a little different. The old, Apostrophe websites are still not working perfectly but TTS is continuing to work on it.

TTS has a directory tool (directory.trinity.duke.edu) that imports data from FDS, which synchs to Scholars. Once the automatic feed goes away, FDS will no longer be available. Users can email tts-websys-projects@duke.edu with questions.

Questions

• Is the percentage updated since inception or the last month? Since inception although the numbers take into account the folks that are gone.
• Is FDS still available to faculty? Yes, they can login but they cannot add new information to FDS. They can also “clean” old data from FDS that they no longer want to display publically.
• One challenge is downloading the CV: where is it pulling from? The “Download CV” button creates a file and downloads it to the standard downloads folder on your local PC.
• What about bachelor’s degrees – our dFac user won’t add them without documentation. Only the highest degree must be verified. If your dFac user has questions, they can submit a dFac Help ticket.
• What about joint titles? Currently, all appointments data comes from dFac, and appointments in dFac are associated with one organization. A joint title is just like a secondary except there is funding involved.

Next meeting: Tuesday, May 3 in Erwin Mill.

March 1, 2016

Outreach Update

• We held three faculty focus group lunches and conducted usability tests to get feedback from faculty re: navigating Scholars and editing their profiles.
• Lamont held office hours at the History Department and will hold another office hours day.
• Usage metrics: visitors have been slowly increasing at a modest pace. We’re starting to track bounce rate (meaning the percentage that users leave the entrance page within 10 seconds) and the bounce rate has decreased from 76% to 70% in the first two months of last year to the same this year. As we make profiles more engaging, we hope that this rate decreases.

Development Update

Recent enhancements now in production:

• Search engine optimization task 1 of 4: change the display of Scholars page in Search results page. Results in Google now appear as “Anne Daphne Yoder | Scholars@Duke.”
• Long author lists are now limited to roughly 500 characters, without truncating names.
• We’ve added “museum collections” to Artistic Works types.
• Improvements have been made to the non-faculty profile creation page
• Enable former faculty to have non-faculty profiles created (formerly prevented by the system).
• Fixed a problem that displayed information about a profile edit multiple times
• Fixed a problem that displayed historical named professorships (which have ended) on Scholars profiles

Road map:
Development tasks currently in progress:

• Multiple improvements to keywords/subject headings, which should roll out by mid-March
• Search results improvements are underway and will be implemented in three phases over many months: infrastructure additions that will be invisible from Scholars, basic search options, and advanced search results.
• To support complete CVs in Scholars, many data fields will be added and Profile Manager will be re-designed to make it easier for users to edit their profiles.

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Continue search engine optimizations (SEO) tasks: 2 of 4 is in progress which will create an alias for each individual’s profile URL
• Resolving “orphan” data left over from departed faculty profiles
• Upgrade to VIVO 1.8 with improved visualizations
• Add non-faculty courses

Data Consumers Support Model

• Julia talked about the most streamlined approach to getting help with department or school websites. When users see problems on your school/department website related to data from Scholars, first check the Scholars profile to see if the problem exists on the profile page, and contact the right team for help:
  • If the problem does exist on the Scholars profile, contact the Scholars team.
  • If the problem is not displayed on the Scholars profile, contact your website developer. The developer should troubleshoot the Scholars feed and contact the Scholars team if there are problems with the feed.
• We’ll be discussing the support policies more in the March Data Consumer’s Group meeting.

Guest speaker

• Haley Walton, the Elements Outreach Coordinator, presented Almetric to the group today. Altmetric can help faculty understand the impact of their research. Similar to “In the News,” Altmetric looks on the web to find mentions of their research in many sources.
• For outreach to faculty, you can show them Altmetrics to get them interested in what’s being said about their research. However, in order to be searched by Altmetric, their publications must be approved in Elements. The Altmetric Explorer enables organization-specific reporting.
• Is there a way to export Altmetric reports to a word doc? Yes, you can create an account, create a dashboard and save your searches. The dashboard simplifies the information you’re looking at regularly.
• The Office of News and Communication is tracking how their press releases about Duke research is being picked up by news agencies. Some faculty members are working with grad students to work these Altmetric scores into their CVs as post docs. Libraries are looking at it to see what media is being used by people.
• Caveats: Altmetrics does not substitute for other indices that are more authoritative and are used for promotion/tenure review. But it does show the uptake of recent research in the scholarly or wider communities. Also, papers in the Open Access repository can be publicized in social media, which will be tracked by Altmetric.

Questions

• How does Altmetric interact with PubMed? If you don’t subscribe to the journal in which the article is published, you won’t be able to see the article. However, in most cases, a manuscript version of the paper can be uploaded to the Open Access Repository and made available publically.
• Can you give an update on the annual reporting tool? Yes, Duke Web Services created a web application for Pratt’s Scholarly Activity Reporting process, and it was used by all faculty in Pratt. Feedback was mixed because it was found to be a little cumbersome when faculty were inputting large amounts of data. We’ll be looking at revising the app and making it available to other schools for next year.

Next meeting
April 5, Tuesday at 8:30 am

February 2, 2016

Outreach Update

• Lamont met with faculty in Immunology, History, Duke Human Vaccine Institute and Art, Art History and Visual Studies. He also met with Pratt faculty to help with the SAR. Lamont talked about the meetings that have gone really well and indicated that working with power users ahead of the meeting is key to making a plan to address concerns. Also, working in advance to prepare the chair can be a tremendous help to other faculty.
• Lamont is also looking at bounce rate and pages per session. We are aiming for a 50% bounce rate and about 3 pages per session so that we know that most users are browsing and engaging with the site.
• Total number of profiles edited is now 41%.

Development update

• Recent additions include tweaks to the non-faculty profiles that are allowed for former faculty, upgraded the Elements web service, new photos on the Home page, and a number of minor technical improvements.

Road map
Scheduled/in progress:

• A number of improvements to keywords/subject headings will go into production soon
• Developers are looking into options for improving Scholars search results
• Profile Manager redesign, including more fields to support a complete CV.

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Search engine optimizations: Google results for Scholars profiles will show more information about the profile.
• Added grants to researchers with roles other than PI Co-PI. This has increased the grants load substantially. Power users should check in with their SPS security officers or submit a Scholars Help ticket to find out who their SPS contact is.

Demo

• Lamont showed the group recent features in Profile Manager such as the CV, user metrics, and the number of pending publications in Elements.

Questions

• Are there advantages to feeding Scholars data to our department site or why not link just to the Scholars profile? Probably because departments want to have a presence that is branded for their organization. They add information that’s specific to their department and feed Scholars data to that. TTS thinks that they will be feeding more Scholars data in the future as well.
• Keywords: How many profiles now have no Subject Headings section? Since we did the mass hide of unedited keywords, the majority of profiles don’t have Subject Headings sections. With our improved keyword functionality, we will be publicizing and encouraging Scholars users to add subject headings to their profiles.

Next meeting

• March 1, 8:30 am in A103 Erwin Mill

January 5, 2016

Outreach Update

• In December, Lamont met with individual faculty in December and had office hours with Engineering faculty. Visitors to Scholars were down in December due to the holidays, but edits to profiles continued as did requests for help from faculty over the holidays.  

Development update

• New in January: a CV can be generated from your Scholars profile. After logging in to Profile Manager, users can click "Generate CV" to open a Word document with Scholars profile information.
• In Profile Manager, after logging in, users can see pageview analytics (number of unique visitors to view profile in last 7 days or 90 days and total number of visitors).
• Grants for roles other than Investigator and Co-Investigator, such as Statistician, Mentor, and Associate, are now loading in Scholars@Duke.
• Profile Manager now displays the number of pending publications in Elements.
• For easier browsing, the back button takes viewers back to expanded sections on profile pages.
• All user-provided URLs now  open in a new browser tab/window.

Added to widgets:

• New grant roles
•  "In the News" section
• More details about conference publications

Road map:
Scheduled/in progress:

• Advanced search
• CV phase 2/Profile Manager improvements  
• Improve keywords/subject headings
•  dFac 4.2 release

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Add search engine optimizations
• Create alias for profile URLs
• Add non-faculty courses

Guest speakers

• Paolo Mangiafico:
  • The Elements team has a new website and new documentation. Please check it out at https://scholarworks.duke.edu/elements/. There’s a PDF that you can download.
  • Recently, Elements email notifications were activated for School of Medicine on December 3. An email went out to 2,600+ faculty members who had pending publications. This email contained a link to Elements and was quite successful in getting faculty to take action with their publications.
  • The notifications will go out once a month to faculty who have pending publications. Paolo will be talking to communicators in other schools as well. For Arts & Sciences, this notification will not be activated anytime soon.
• Ed Gomes:
  • Trinity Technology Services launched a website (trinity.duke.edu/trinity-directory-tool) to inform faculty about the transition for the departmental websites from FDS to Scholars and the Trinity Directory tool. This website tells you all about this directory tool. Eventually, you will be able to edit data directly in the directory tool.
  • This directory tool makes it easy to see which publication is in FDS and/or Elements so that Elements can be updated.
  • TTS would like for all of the updates to be made in Scholars and Elements by April 15. Anything that’s not in Scholars will be deleted from FDS.
  • If a faculty member’s departmental webpage is not updating correctly, contact TTS by emailing tts-websys-projects@duke.edu.
  • This is also being done for Sanford and Nursing (possibly).

Questions

• When will the directory tool be available for editing? Hopefully soon but TTS resources have been pulled into other priorities.
• If a faculty member has publications that she wants to make available, can she upload the rough draft? She can ask the Elements of team by emailing elements.duke.edu.

Next meeting: Tuesday, February 2, 2016.

December 1, 2015

Outreach Update

• In November, we did Scholars and Elements training, demo to Pathology department.
• We hosted a Scholars table at Basic Sciences day.
• We’re working with power users in Engineering to prepare for their annual reporting process using their online SAR.
• For the Art/Art History/Visual Studies department, we had two half-days of assistance to faculty members in office hours.
• We’ve had some visits and meetings with individual faculty as well.
• Usage metrics reflect a lot of activity with many Arts & Sciences faculty editing their professional activities, and the total number of profiles edited increases very gradually every month.

Development update

• Work done in November including adding profiles for post docs and grad students, improving the process of creating non-faculty profiles, preventing non-faculty profiles for faculty members, adding positions for non-faculty to widgets, enabling widgets to be updated in real time, and creating a basic CV, which is currently in production.

Road map
Scheduled/in progress:

• Improve keywords/subject headings: remove uncurated keywords on Jan 15. Enable users to request additional keywords to be added manually from DBpedia.
• Create CV from Scholars data: we will be adding many fields including previous employment, grant dollars, board certifications, and other information that is typically on CVs.
• Improve search results: we will be working on analyses and paper prototypes in December and January.

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Add “updated date” to widgets to enable Drupal module to refresh data more effectively
• Add search engine optimizations
• Create alias for profile URLs
• Add non-faculty courses

Questions

• Do you ever do webinars? We haven’t yet but that’s a great idea—we’ll look into it! This would help the students and faculty who work remotely.
• When will the VIVO Search be available? This is on the VIVO road map for future development. See CTSA Connect for an example of a similar search tool (ctsaconnect.org)
• Can we pull patents data by entering the patent number and pulling the other patent data? This is a great idea – we have been investigating ways to load patents into Scholars@Duke and we will continue to look at promising options. Hopefully we can collaborate with Engineering!

November 9, 2015

Outreach Update

• Scholars publicity week happened in October and we enjoyed meeting a lot of new users. We had a lot of interest from graduate students.
• Lamont held a training class early in October.
• Scholars got a big bump when Paul Modrich won the Nobel prize and we sent his link to the news venues. We saw double the number of visitors on that day.
• Please submit a support ticket to schedule a meeting with Lamont and a faculty member.
• We have training sessions on November 4 and December 3 in the Soc-Psych building on West Campus. Please let us know if you have suggestions about dates or locations for training.

Development Update

Recently completed items include incremental updating of widgets, basic CV generation, students profiles added, new info from Elements for conference papers, keywords search improvements (see Recent Updates for more information)

Scheduled/in progress:

• Create CV from Scholars data
• Improve keywords/subject headings
• Improve search results (design is being planned)

Background/concurrent tasks:

• Add search engine optimizations
• Create alias for profile URLs
• Add non-faculty courses

Questions?

• What information is loaded into Scholars for students and non-faculty? We load names, directory title and contact information for non-faculty. Students and non-faculty will not have searches turned on in Elements. We will be adding courses for non-faculty and grants in Scholars in the next few months.
• What about publications that are available ahead of print? Elements will not harvest publications that are not yet published. Once it’s printed, Elements will find it in bibliographic sources and can de-duplicate them if possible. If not, you can hide the manual publication.
• What about faculty members with international degrees? If these are not in dFac, we can add those – please submit a Help ticket.
• Can faculty add a link to the courses page? They can add a link to the course with other links but they can’t add the link next to the course itself.

October 5, 2015

Outreach Update

• The Scholars table has been appearing sound School of Medicine locations recently and we have also been doing more individual help sessions with faculty.
• Please let us know if you’d like to meet with us, either as a department or individually.
• Scholars training sessions will be monthly for the rest of the year.
• Usage metrics have been steadily increasing.

Development update

• We’ve added many additions to the widgets: netID, office hours, school and to the organizational widget, overview section and photo.
• Office hours can now be entered into Profile Manager.
• Non-faculty profiles can have multiple affiliations.
• Many minor fixes (see Recent Updates page)

Road map: these improvements are scheduled and/or in progress:

• Create CV from Scholars data
• Improve keywords/subject headings
• Improve search results
• Add search engine optimizations
• Create alias for profile URLs
• Add non-faculty courses

Guest presentation: Minnie Glymph, Executive Director of Communications at Pratt School of Engineering

• The Scholars@Duke team in the Pratt School of Engineering includes Minnie Glymph, Corky Safley and Marnie Rhodes, now in the Office of the Vice Provost of Research.
• Pratt rolled out with Scholars in summer of 2013. Corky has created a Drupal module that enables Pratt to create local profiles for students and others who are not in Scholars@Duke.
• To encourage faculty engagement, they emphasize that Scholars is the single source of info about faculty using the Create Once Publish Everywhere (COPE) strategy. Faculty also like the Open Access option as well as the automated content.
• The Pratt Intranet talks about specifically the Pratt power users and information about how the Scholars information appears on the Pratt website. They have a Q&A document: Inside.pratt.duke.edu/communications.
• Pratt includes Scholars in the new faculty orientation and meets with faculty about their profiles. They meet with new faculty but timing is an issue; new faculty would prefer their profiles go live before they start, so Pratt manually creates a "stub" profile until their real profile is live.
• Pratt displays Scholars information on their digital displays and promotes training opportunitties. Their 2015 campaign focused on faculty who had not updated their publications and emphasizing help from power users and and other sources. They followed up a month later with another email. This engagement paid off and metrics showed a big usage increase in July. In Pratt, 64% of the profiles have been edited.
• In November and December, Pratt faculty will be using on online Scholarly Activity Report, their annual report, using Scholars.

Questions:

• When are Scholars profiles created? On the first day of a faculty member's active primary appointment, their Scholars profile is automatically created by Scholars@Duke.
• What about non-faculty information on A&S websites? Will staff, grad students etc be present? Yes, check with TTS about timeline. An announcement should be coming out shortly. They are looking for volunteers to test out the functionality.
• If faculty are concerned about losing data in FDS, there are ways to port their information. They should be encouraged to update their Scholars profiles.
• Can faculty export their FDS information? It depends on what they’re looking for. There may be a way to access their FDS information, but it will not be easily accessible.
• When will annual reports go away in FDS? A&S has already moved away from annual reporting in FDS. This will be announced during the budget period.
• What’s the best way to help faculty members through the A&S transition? Please spread the word that help is available. They should contact their power user, the Scholars team, or Ed Gomes in TTS. To request help from the Scholars team, please submit a Help ticket.

Next meeting: November 3,  A103 Erwin Mill.

September 1, 2015

Outreach activities:

• We’ve continued to host an information table in various locations in the School of Medicine for “Mobile Office Hours.”
• We provided a Scholars@Duke overview and demonstration for the Department of Romance Studies Faculty Retreat (8/17).
• Scholars@Duke and Elements August Training Class (8/19) - Next training class: Wednesday, September 16th from 11:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in Sociology - Psychology Building, Room 133
• Metrics: Largest percentage increase of faculty profiles updated since last month occurred in the School of Medicine (3%). Total visitors to Scholars@Duke are up as faculty and students return to campus. The number of returning visitors and Duke sessions have also continued to increase. Most frequent edits by faculty were to professional activities and artistic works. Most frequent edits by delegates were to photos.

Development update:

• For last two weeks, we’ve had significant problems with the SAP data load, which gives us people, educations, organizations, etc. and determines who has a profile in Scholars. Our developers have been working on the problem and running the load manually, but this unplanned work has affected our ability to move forward on planned tasks.
• Enabled non-faculty profiles to have multiple affiliations (in test).
• Planning coding and user interface improvements to Keywords search in Profile Manager.
• Updated grants calculations with recent SPS changes (in test).
• Multiple additions to widgets are in progress for September (completion date postponed two weeks due to load issues described above).

Elements Update

• Paolo Mangiafico provided a brief Elements update. In particular, Paolo discussed that much work as been done in working with various schools to craft school specific Elements email notification messages to alert faculty to pending publications. Fuqua Business School and the School of Law would like to opt out of receiving these email notifications.

User questions:

• Is it possible to list a single degree from a joint program (two universities) - I don't see where you can list multiple universities for the same degree in dFac? Dale LaPointe (dFac Analyst) will work with Kendrick Tatum to better understand the limitation in dFac and if this can be incorporated going forward.
• How will annual reporting be conducted this year for Trinity Arts and Sciences? We anticipate that annual reporting will be conducted very similarly to last year. Trinity Technology Services will be in contact with departments prior to that time to confirm what that process will be.

August 4, 2015

Outreach activities:

• We’ve set up a table in various locations in the School of Medicine for “Mobile Office Hours.” We met with the University Institutes and Centers (UIC) communicators lunch. We did a demo for the department of Psychiatry.
• Next training: Wednesday August 19. We will be adding a second training date in August in case this date is tough at the beginning of the semester.
• Metrics: Total visitors are down slightly probably due to the summer but the returning visitors and Duke sessions have increased.

Development update:

• In the News section on profiles went into production today but loading news items for all faculty members will take another week. You can refresh the section in Profile Manager to get the most recent stories.
• Currently working on enabling multiple orgs to be added to non-faculty profiles. There will also be additions to the widgets in August.

Road Map:

• Keywords/Subject Headings strategy is on hold until we discuss it with a data consumer who is relying on current keywords.
• Next functionality will be additions to Search features and the basic CV functionality for fall.

Guest presentation:

• Eve Duffy talked about how her office created the Duke in the World map. Eve populated this information herself, for the most part. She also searched Scholars by country to see what she could find on a faculty member’s Scholars profile.
• Expertise means that the faculty member has knowledge of the country and has not just resided in the country. Doing research in the country does not necessarily mean that you know about the country. Taiwan was recently added and Eve has added people with Global Scholarship in Taiwan.
• This was a complicated project that Eve streamlined by keeping the plan simple and agreeing to curate the global scholarship data initially to get the map populated.

User questions:

• How can we add local (school) news stories to the In the News section, meaning those that don’t go through Duke Today? We discussed this with the group. Nicholas, Law, Medicine are very interested and could help us brainstorm ideas for doing this. We will add this to our enhancement list.
• Will any of these items expire? Not at this point. The list of news items will continue to be added. We may come up with a limit for the number of news items to display but haven't done that yet.
• Is there any way to filter the Duke in the World map by school? Currently you select a school to see which countries are associated with that school's faculty, but the list of faculty is not filtered by school. We all agreed that it's a good idea, and Eve will talk to DWS about it.
• Can we add courses, that is courses taught at duke about a certain country? Great idea -- we'll add to our enhancement list.
• If we feel that our school is underrepresented, how do we get more data into the Duke map? Encourage faculty to login to their Scholars profile and add Global Scholarship for themselves, or find a delegate to do it on behalf of faculty.

July 7, 2015

Outreach activities:

• In addition to office hours and regular training sessions, we did a number of demos and meetings with individual groups.
• Internal usage (editing) numbers have increased slightly over last month, indicating work continues on updating Scholars profiles.
• Please let us know if you or others in your group would like more training. We can set up individual training sessions on-site if that works best.

Development update:

• We’ve been working on the In the News section, caching profiles and improving performance, adding new photos to the Home page, and a number of recent problems with publication loads. “In the News” should be ready for testing soon.

Road Map:

• Immediate priorities include the “In the News” section, improving keywords, improving the Search functionality, features for Arts & Sciences’ website transition, and adding CV functionality.
• We talked in detail about a proposed plan to improve keywords. We would like to remove publication keywords (which load from Elements based on keywords added by publishers) from the Subject Headings section on the Scholars profile. We will not remove publications from any Subject Headings sections that have been edited by users at all; if any keywords have been added or hidden, we will assume that the list has been curated and we will not remove any keywords.
• The group suggested that we keep the publication keywords and make them associated with publications, even if those are not displayed on the profile page. We agreed to add this change to the proposed plan.

Guest presentation:

• Paolo Mangiafico from Duke Libraries discussed the email notification plan and showed us new Altmetrics explorer which enables Altmetrics information to be aggregated for faculty in groups.
• Duke users can go to almetricsexplorer.com and create an account using their Duke email address. An overview session will be held on July 16 and additional training sessions will be given thoroughout the fall.

User questions:

• Do we feel that a great percentage of profiles have been edited or not? We know that 51% of profiles have been edited at least once but that is counting all of the profiles since 2013; many of these people have left and many have joined Duke. We are working on ways to target those folks who have never edited their profiles.
• Elements notifications – can we tailor the message by organization? Yes, we can customize the language by school.
• Can schools opt out of the notification? Yes, by school. But there’s no opting out by department or faculty member. The first time, the notification email will be longer and subsequent emails can be shorter.
• What will be the frequency of these emails? The first time will be sent manually and the schools can choose when it goes out. Going forward, the frequency will need to be the same for everyone in the University. We could run it once or twice a semester. Paolo would like to run it more frequently after the first run.
• Will people get a reminder if they ignore the email? No – only if there are new publications. Elements has a reminder process but that’s separate. Schools are probably not on the same schedule re: annual processes. Ideally, the dean’s office would give their faculty a preview about this email coming and urge them to pay attention to it.
• Can we share this communication with the communicators? Yes. Paolo will be working with communicators on this notification.
• Will we be no longer allowing profiles for non-faculty and grad students? That is not the case – we will continue to enable academic staff and students to have Scholars profiles. We are discussing whether or not these profiles should be created automatically for staff and grad students. Scholars@Duke is intended to be a set of profiles for people who publish, do research, provide patient care, teach classes and collaborate with other academics at Duke. Since this is a subset of students and staff, automatic creation of these profiles may not make sense.

June 2,2015

Outreach activities:

• Outreach in May was quieter than normal due to the semester ending. Usage metrics reflect a slight slowdown probably for the same reason.

Development update:

• Non-faculty nicknames are loading into Scholars profiles. Professional activities are sorting correctly. A lot of work has been done to improve the indexing and thus improve performance as profiles load.

Guest presentation:

• Anton Zuiker demo’ed the new Department of Medicine website which is going live today (medicine.duke.edu). They began by focusing on photos and held 9 or 10 photo days with a photographer who gives faculty members a few versions of their photos and one is posted on the Scholars profile.
• Medicine site is fed directly from Scholars widgets, and does not use the feed from RAD which was the method of feeding previous School of Medicine sites.
• Anton and Elizabeth have extensive experience with forms and WordPress.
• Anton has suggested that it would be helpful to automate the addition of links to both Scholars and DukeMedicine sites.
• They have put together a fantastic checklist for faculty members to learn how to update their profiles.

User questions:

• How are new faculty informed of Scholars? It depends on the school. Some schools are incorporating Scholars into their onboarding processes. In Arts & Sciences, Mary Jacobs does an orientation for new faculty.
• It would be helpful to have some kind of tutorial for new faculty. It may be better for new faculty to work on it within a month of their arrival rather than as a first priority.
• When will mini grants be displayed for program project grants? The School of Medicine has gotten a lot of requests. This task is on the Scholars development list but there is no ETA yet.
• When will FDS be turned off? Right now, it’s tough for new faculty in A&S to have to populate both FDS and Scholars. Arts & Sciences is working hard to answer this question and will announce the communication plan within a couple of months. Hopefully by the August User Group meeting, we’ll have more information.
• Can we borrow the checklist that Medicine developed for instructing faculty to update their Scholars and DukeMedicine profiles? Yes, we will add the link to that checklist as soon as Medicine’s site goes live.

May 5, 2015

Summary of April Outreach Activities:

• Onsite office hours at the Divinity School – Educated 3 faculty members on how to use Scholars and Elements and assisted them with updating their profiles (4/13)
• Duke Today story publicizing Scholars@Duke published (4/13) --- moderate spike in overall Scholars@Duke usage in two weeks following release of story
• Scholars@Duke overview presentation and demonstration for the Philosophy Department (4/21)
• The first bi-annual “Scholars News Update”, detailing new features and other recent developments, was sent out to School Communicators to distribute as appropriate to their faculty and other Scholars@Duke users (4/28)

April Scholars@Duke Usage Statistics:

• Total Visitors (4/7 - 5/4): 17,807 (down from previous month (22,817)
• Duke Sessions (4/7 - 5/4): 3,262 (down from previous month (4,360)
• In April, most faculty edited their professional activities and overviews, while delegates largely edited web pages and photos.

May Training and Office Hours:

• We’ll be doing training once a month for the remainder of the spring and summer.
• May training class: Wednesday, May 13th - 11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. - Sociology and Psychology Building (Room 133)
• May office hours: Thursday - May 14th, Tuesday - May 19th, Friday - May 29th. Office hours are held in Perkins Library, Study Room 123.
• See the Upcoming Training page for more details on training and office hours.

Development:

• Corrected display and line spacing issues as needed on the People, Schools/Institutes, and Profile pages.
• Currently optimizing the caching process, which will help improve the speed at which pages are refreshed and the overall speed and responsiveness of the website.
• Currently collaborating with the Elements team to add new publication types and subtypes in Elements and display those properly in Scholars@Duke.

Questions from users:

Will it ever be possible to have on-demand refreshes from all Scholars@Duke data sources including SAP?

• Improvements to caching will make many of the data refreshes near real-time.

Where is the professional activities data coming from and can it be programmatically loaded into Scholars@Duke if the source data is provided via an Excel spreadsheet?

• For Trinity Arts and Sciences faculty, the last five years of professional activities was copied from FDS into Scholars@Duke manually. Professional activities can also be entered directly into Scholars@Duke. We will discuss with the Scholars@Duke development team whether we can load professional activities from a spreadsheet.

Can we (Power Users) edit the roles on grants?

• No. Edits to grant information will need to be coordinated through the Office of Research Administration (ORA) and the Office of Research Support (ORS).

 

April 7, 2015

Summary of March Outreach Activities:

• Lamont has been working closely with Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Classical Studies, Literature, and Math departments, and with individual faculty members as well.
• We met with the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship group to talk about ways to capture the digital projects and multi-media projeccts that are going on.
• We’ll be doing training on April 9 and April 24. We also do office hours in Perkins Library (see the Training page.)
• In this meeting, we summarized some of the methodologies we’ve using to help faculty members with their profiles.
• In March, most faculty edited their professional activities, as opposed to keywords in February.

Development:

• The VIVO upgrade was released in March after a long development effort. We added a “Recent Updates” link from the Home page.
• We have lost both of our developers this year and this will have a huge impact on our planned development. We expect to deliver our new features at least two months later than we originally anticipated.
• There will be a Duke Today story published next week so we are hoping to hear from many more faculty after that point, and Power Users should be prepared for additional questions.

Questions from users:

What is the plan for keyword development?

• We are planning to add vocabularies that will enable to faculty to find their keywords more readily. We hope to restrict keyword list to 20 -30 most relevant items that are harvested automatically  

When will FDS go away?

• This is complicated because of all of the connections to FDS, not just the websites but also the evaluations and other processes. TTS will be working this summer to pull the data out of Scholars. Their development is dependent on Scholars development as well.

In Google, when people search for faculty, sometimes both the FDS profile and the Scholars profile come up in results. Is there a way to turn the FDS profile off?

• TTS could work with Dr. Yu to turn off the Google Search for FDS, but this will take some time. FDS pages come up first in the Google searches for Nursing and Sanford. Even after disabling Google, it will take awhile for the Google bots to become updated for all faculty.Can we do this by department? Ed thinks it can be turned off more individually. If people want to consider this, they should contact Ed.

Will the updated course list continue in in FDS?

• No, TTS will be developing a way to feed some of the data that’s coming from FDS. They will be pulling Scholars data as well as some data from other sources as well. Ed will continue to provide updates on their timeline.