A presentation on using Symplectic Elements to populate staff profiles at City University London.

1. Neil Stewart neil.stewart.1@city.ac.uk
Using Professional Activities to create
staff profiles
Presentation for SyRTUG meeting, Tuesday 21 May
2013

2. 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

3. How professional activities look 1

4. How professional activities look 2

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

6. 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?

7. Thanks!
Questions?
Neil.stewart.1@city.ac.uk
http://cityopenaccess.wordpress.com