Neil Stewart neil.stewart.1@city.ac.uk

Using Professional Activities to create staff profiles

Presentation for SyRTUG meeting, Tuesday 21 May 2013

Project overview• City has no university-wide system for providing staff web profiles

• Lots of local solutions in place for Schools/Departments

• REF focused minds!• Decision was made to use Elements in conjunction with our CMS (though we did look at VIVO)

• Goal: to create basic web profiles with Elements as the sole data provider via the Elements API

• “Agile” project development, overseen by a Project Board with academic representation

• Live profiles by September 2013

How professional activities look 1

How professional activities look 2

Live demo!

http://www.city.ac.uk/staging/labs/steve-testing/profiles/academic-experts/professor-john-lawrenson

Positives, negatives• Elements API does a good job of outputting data• Users (hopefully) familiar with Elements UI• City Research Online will gain greater prominence (full

text bonus?)• Something better than nothing!

• Elements UI not designed for recording profile information

• Problem of being able to enter multiple professional activities

• Problem of explaining what (in Elements) ends up where (in profiles)

• End of project: who holds responsibility for maintaining profiles?

Thanks!

Questions?

Neil.stewart.1@city.ac.ukhttp://cityopenaccess.wordpress.com