Supporting Research Information Management in the Research University: Partnerships, Challenges, and Possibilities

Research universities are increasingly engaging in complex efforts to collect and synthesize information about an institution’s research footprint. The collection, updating, and sharing of the campus’s bibliographic research outputs is an increasingly important part of this effort, as institutions seek to develop external profiling systems and enable collaborator discovery and to also increasingly internally understand the research strengths and synergies of an institution for planning and assessment. Institutions are adopting a variety of tools to support research information management (RIM), faculty activity reporting (FAR), and researcher collaboration and discovery on campus. In this presentation, we will talk about the complex and enterprise wide institutional environment in which this research information management effort is taking place, including an overview of the multiple stakeholders: libraries, research offices, colleges and departments, provosts, and many others. The University of Illinois and Virginia Tech University will provide in-depth case studies about their own campus efforts, talking specifically about campus partnerships, RIM products, bibliographic data sources and gaps, implementation challenges, and faculty engagement. We will conclude with a discussion about the opportunities for greater interoperability between siloed campus systems that collect bibliographic metadata, and the important and evolving role of the library in this emerging and poorly defined community of practice.