The libraries role in Research Information Management

Research information management (RIM) is traditionally the domain of the research office in modern institutions, traditionally with little input from other departments.  However currently thinking and systems integration is turning this notion on its head.

An OCLC report, Research Information Management: DefiningRIM and the Library’s Role[1], published in October 2017, aims to place libraries as not only a stakeholder in the RIM space, but as an active participant.  What follows is a summary of this report.

But what is meant by RIM?  According to the OCLC report, RIM is the “aggregation, curation and utilisation of information about research”, or “institutional curation of the institutional scholarly record”.  Another very succinct definition by Science Europe is that it is the “data about research activities, rather than the research data generated by researchers.”  An important thing to note is that RIM data is metadata only – it rarely, if ever, includes the actual artefact being described.  For example, RIM publication data is at the metadata level, and doesn’t include the actual publication itself.  This is usually held in a different system, such as an institutional repository.

No matter how it is defined, over the years institutions have developed many systems, practices and workflows in order to capture the varied types of information sourced from many different areas of the institution.  At my own institution, RIM activity is sourced from four enterprise systems and an unknown number of local departmental systems, all owned by the research office, library, human resources, finance and the faculties themselves.  Not all of this information comes together in the one place but much of it does, with faculties, libraries and the research office selectively (and often manually) supplementing the data with additional information if the situation requires it.  This lack of interoperability between systems is something that many institutions, including my own, is struggling with.  Having such disparate systems, often managed by different departments with different workflows, creates huge barriers to the flow if RIM metadata.  Collaboration and communication between stakeholders is key to effective RIM management.

So what can, and what does, the library bring to the table?  The OCLC report states that RIM systems collect and store metadata on research outputs and activities including those shown in the figure below.

Source: 2017. Research Information Management: Defining RIM and the Library’s Role, pg 6.

This data can be utilised in a variety of ways including academic progress, grants management and in researcher profiles, to name a few.  This is best displayed in the figure below from the OCLC report.

Source: 2017. Research Information Management: Defining RIM and the Library’s Role, pg 8.

So, where does the library fit into this.  Traditionally libraries have been viewed as places of collection development and not much else.  My institution isn’t too different.  There is a huge student focus on the activities of the librarians, to the extent that many stakeholders are only just realising the value that the library can bring to RIM discussions, and unfortunately some don’t realise it at all. However, libraries are hot-pots of expertise in scholarly communication and they should be pushing to be recognised as such.

The report segregates library expertise in four groups: publications and scholarship; training and support; discoverability, access and reputational support; and stewards of the institutional record, all of which are critical ways in which the library can support RIM activities.

Publications and Scholarship Expertise

Metadata, bibliographic records, publication indexes and more are all bread and butter to many librarians.  It is the stuff they have been doing since graduating from university (and in many cases, before).  This is what librarians do, and they do it well.  They have the relationships with the vendors that supply citation products, many of which also now have their own RIM systems.  They are knowledgeable about trends in the publishing sphere, and in my experience, are extremely skilful in identifying and correcting duplicate or incorrect bibliographic metadata for research publications or indeed about the researchers themselves. 

Training and Support for End Users

Librarians are expert trainers, having trained scores of students throughout their degrees in bibliographic searches, data management, citation management, publishing and open access, and research metrics.  While at my institution librarians do not train directly in RIM, I don’t think anyone else does either.  This leaves a perfect opening for the librarians to get involved and fill the gap.

Discoverability, Access and Reputational Support

In a day where reputation is everything, libraries are uniquely situated to provide reputational impact for institutions.  Research publications are a major output of universities and they are largely externally facing meaning that the reputation of an institution is judged in part on the quality of the research being conducted.  This is largely communicated via publication outputs (although impact metrics and research data are fast becoming legitimate indicators of reputation).  Libraries, through institutional open access repositories, provide data to profile pages, comply with funding open access mandates for the institution, make outputs more discoverable thereby providing the potential for higher citation rates, and offer a wide range of bibliometrics and altmetrics that support researcher reputation.

Stewards of the Institutional Record

Libraries, including my own, play an integral role as stewards of the institutional record.  Receipt, curation, discoverability and preservation of scholarly outputs, as well as archival material, is a core component of the libraries work.  This is often an outward facing collection that is the basis for a large amount of institutional reporting.

The library has a great deal to offer institutions in the research information management space, much of which goes unnoticed by potential stakeholders in those very institutions. RIM reporting benefits institutions in many ways, providing insights into the school, faculty or institutional level, benchmarking and collaboration information, and impact and engagement narratives.  I recommend that anyone working in the RIM space to have a read of the OCLC report, particularly in the library field, although any RIM stakeholder will find the information valuable. 

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[1] Bryant, Rebecca, Anna Clements, Carol Feltes, David Groenewegen, Simon Huggard, Holly Mercer, Roxanne Missingham, Maliaca Oxfam, Anne Raul and John Wright. 2017. Research Information Management: Defining RIM and the Library’s Role, OH: OCLC Research. DOI:10.25333/C3NK88

Your online scholarly identity...why is it important?

There are so many tools out there now to help researchers build their online identity – ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the list goes on. But what do we mean by ‘online identity’ and why is it so important to researchers? (A side question could also be why we, as librarians, care about this when obviously, many researchers don’t? But that is another story altogether).

So, what do we mean by online identity. Everyone has an online identity if you have had anything to do with the internet. Type your name into Google and most people will get at least one hit on their name with some people getting many hits. But why is this important? Your online identity is what people who don’t know you (but know about you) search for – prospective employers, colleagues, rivals, people you have just met at a conference. From a professional viewpoint, it is important that these people find your information, and most importantly, find accurate information easily.

Maintaining and curating your professional identity is the key to achieving this. But in a minefield of options which ones do you choose?

You have probably been using products that you have either been using in a previous life, or that your colleagues are already using. However, no matter which product (or products) you use, it is critical that these be kept up to date. There is nothing worse that searching and finding someone’s profile only to find that the most recent publication listed is from four years ago, or where they say they work is clearly not the case.

Where I work, we have three that we recommend that researchers keep up to date – ORCID, Google Scholar profile and of course, the institutional repository.

[Note: for the purpose of this I am discounting social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – all of which are important in disseminating information about yourself and your works.]

ORCID has quickly risen to be a universal identifier for scholarly outputs, and, why wouldn’t it? It is free to use, independent, and has a fantastic developing team behind it. Being a truly independent identifier also means that it easily integrates with external systems (unless you work where I do, where nothing really seems to integrate with anything else – but that is a whole other issue). With ORCID you can upload your outputs, or connect to another data source (such as Scopus or Research Data Australia) and any of your works listed in these data sources will be imported into your profile. You can add grant information, education and work details, as well as provide links to other online profiles that you maintain. By sharing your ORCID iD URL with colleagues you can provide a quick, one-stop-shop to all professional information about yourself.

The second online profile we recommend curating is a Google Scholar My Citations Profile. Google Scholar is big….not as big as Google, but in academic circles it is still pretty awesome. Having a Google Scholar profile set up is one key way for other people to find your research. Of course, it relies on your publications being indexed and available in Google, although there is the option of manually adding selected metadata about those that aren’t in Google. A word of warning – it is very easy to accidently add publications that aren’t yours to your profile, or for someone else to add your publications to their profile. Careful checking and periodic searches of your works may be advisable.

Which brings us to the old favourite, the institutional repository. Love it or hate it, it is here to stay and likely tied into your institutions reporting requirements. So, love it or hate it, you may be required to use it. I love our institutional repository, even the funny quirks that make it frustrating to work with, but it serves a purpose and a function in our academic community. And it is easy for our researchers. All they need to do is send in the metadata of their recent publications and the Research Collections team does the rest! It is a way for researchers to archive their outputs, preserve them, make them open access, and provides a nice link that they can send out to colleagues. It is also indexed by Google, so readily discoverable for anyone searching for your publications. I can’t speak highly enough for institutional repositories around the world – they are by far the best way to promote your research.

This then leaves us with the ‘badies’ of the online scholarly identity world – ResearchGate and Adademia.edu. I must admit that each of these have their place in the scholarly identity world, and all three of them are wildly popular in various disciplines. My reasons for disliking them are purely selfish – they are a rival to our institutional repository. And in this day and age where everyone is time poor, why invest your energies in keeping these up to date as well as the other critical profiles. ResearchGate and Academica.edu are both proprietary products that could turn off at any time. They have no preservation strategy and no commitment to keeping your work safe. If you wish to use them to disseminate your works, then please, please, please do so as an additional method to those listed above.



So now that you have all methods for people to find information about you and your works, what do you do? The key is to spend some time each week, month, couple of months (depending on your frequency of publication) updating them. As stated above, there is nothing worse than colleagues or other interested people finding an out of date profile. By keeping these updated, you are presenting your best self to those that want to find you.