audience: potential future implementers

Practice at the University of Florida

At the University of Florida (UF) there are sources available containing data related to people, grants, publications and courses. Due to the availability of this information, the UF VIVO implementation includes information for all 16 colleges and subsequent departments, regardless of discipline. The majority of UF faculty - including librarians/information specialists, administrators, clinicians, and emeritus - are included, as well as all researcher staff. While support staff will not be automatically included, any UF employee listed in our HR PeopleSoft database can request to have a VIVO profile created.

VIVO is an open, Semantic Web-based network that facilitates networking and collaboration of researchers including investigators, technical staff and others. Created by Cornell, VIVO was initially designed for researchers within the Life Sciences but soon expanded to include all colleges and departments. As research continues to become more interdisciplinary, the need to build deep collaborations between disparate fields of study has become ever more valuable. There are many realms where biomedicine, and other scientific fields, cross over into the arts and humanities: impact of medical advances, issues of health care access, public health policy, end-of-life issues, medicine and the media, literature and medicine, etc. For that reason VIVO encourages implementation partners to be as inclusive as possible regarding who is included within a local VIVO system. Additionally, with a national interface linking researchers across institutions, the possibilities for collaboration and networking grows even stronger.

There are a wide variety of people who would benefit from VIVO, including scientists, students, staff (technicians, etc.) and administrators (lab managers, etc.). Using Cornell's model, potential VIVO partners are likely to begin with biomedical fields and then eventually expand to all scientists. At the University of Florida, we began with the Life and Physical Sciences departments and included all faculty - from librarians/information specialists, administrators, clinicians, emeritus, to researcher staff. The University of Florida hopes to extend their system to support staff and graduate students at some point in the near future.

Each implementation partner site will have varying technical environments, depending on the availability of data within harvest-able sources. These requirements may dictate how inclusive an institution can be in reflecting overall institutional organization, subject scope, or personnel.