Wednesday, October 28 at 11:00 EDT
LG members:
Paul Albert, Ann Beynon, Robert Cartolano, Mike Conlon, Anna Guillaumet, Doug Hahn, Christian Hauschke, Anthony Helm, bruce herbert, Damaris Murry 
Terrie Wheeler
LYRASIS:
Laurie Gemmill Arp, Robert Miller, Michele Mennielli
Regrets:
= Secretary
Connection Information
Zoom connection information is available in the Outlook invitation.
Agenda
Greetings - Bruce (4 mins)
Andrew Woods/Mic - transitioning the mailing list (<10 mins)
Laurie Arp - Lyrasis updates (tentative) 10 mins
Christian Hauschke - German VIVO Updates (tentative) 10 mins
Bruce - Discussion of the VIVO-In-A-Box Proposal (30 mins)
- Goals
- Technical
- Services
- Roles
Meeting Minutes
VIVO Leadership Group October 28, 2020 Meeting Minutes
Bruce – Open Meeting / Announcements / December Meeting Date
Bruce: Welcome everyone! Brief reminder that today is also the Lyrasis Leaders Circle Forum (more information here: https://www.lyrasis.org/Leadership/Pages/Leaders-Forum-Innovation-Through-a-Downturn.aspx), and that Anna Guillaumet gave a fantastic presentation this morning regarding rapid change to cope with COVID-19 restrictions. Many congratulated Anna on her contribution to the Leaders Circle Forum!
Bruce led a brief discussion about the date/time for the December meeting. After quick discussion about possible December dates, December 16, 2020 was agreed upon as the best date for our December meeting.
Andrew Woods/Mic - Transitioning the Mailing List
Mic – Other projects are now using Google Groups for their mailing list. Andrew Woods has already created a VIVO LG mailing list in Google Groups, if we want to use it. The new mailing list system also supports message archives. Originally the VIVO LG and Steering mail groups was set up by Cornell team in G Suite. Is everyone in agreement with this change?
Bruce: We want to take advantage of the administrative support that Lyrasis offers whenever possible.
All were in favor of transitioning to using the list that Andrew Woods set up.
Laurie Arp - Lyrasis Updates
Laurie: Fedora is one of the grants we are working on – 6.0 is the next big release. Most of the community still on 3.0. Received an IMLS planning grant to determine on challenges of migration. One finding is that time commitment needs to be commensurate with the value Fedora 6.0. The next phase was funded, and Fedora community now creating tools to help with migrations. Migration to Fedora 6.0 grant: https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-246264-ols-20
It Takes a Village – issued the guidebook in 2018. Everyone liked it, and yet didn’t know how to use it. Next grant to create a toolbox. Now doing a series of workshops on each facet, starting with testing the tools and evaluating their applicability and success. It Takes a Village grant: https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-246253-ols-20
Christian Hauschke - German VIVO Updates
Christian gave a nice overview of German VIVO projects. A big University in Germany is moving to evaluate VIVO starting next January (2021). TAPIR is the German acronym for Partially automated persistent identifier based reporting. This is a grant that Christian got with his team. The call is about advancing quality in science. Specifically asked for applications regarding reporting. Aims to use open data sources connected with VIVO for reporting. Want to find out how far they can go with open data. DataCite Commons is one of these open data sources. Aim to foster the role of PID’s, and to harvest data into local VIVOs. The search stage will evaluate how good the data is that is pulled in, and does this data represent coverage well, is it complete, etc. Vitro query tool will be used to create reports. 4-5 German institutions use the VQT already. Aligning their reporting with CERIF
Ann: Discussed process for welcoming new VIVO institutions. Once an organization registers their VIVO site, the VIVO Membership and Community Engagement Interest Group reaches out to them to make them aware of the VIVO Community, and VIVO benefits. There is a template letter that includes a robust list of VIVO resources available to them, with links. This team is encouraged to customize these letters to engage with the new member. This kind of engagement encourages more active participation, especially as important developments in the VIVO Community arise.
Bruce - Discussion of the VIVO-In-A-Box Proposal
Bruce has been approached by several universities in the US to stand up VIVO. For example, just during our VIVO LG meeting, he received expressions of interest in learning how to stand up their own VIVO’s from two universities. Overall, these universities are expressing the following desired goals for their VIVO instance: data reporting, connecting researchers, visualizations. If we can move forward with the concept discussed last month of VIVO in a box, this application should minimally support these goals.
These universities approaching Bruce are generally smaller and they worry about limited technical resources. To help these newer schools, we need a simpler implementation to get them started with VIVO. This would be the concept of VIVO in a box. Technically this should require limited customization, so that little or no developer time is needed. We need to give the schools early wins, so that they can show their administrators what they have achieved, and then lobby for more resources to expand or customize as needed by their institutions.
VIVO in a box would make more open data available. Some services we may want to consider along with VIVO in a box might be a short-term training program to teach people how to integrate data and create reporting for their respective universities. Another service we could consider is pairing up a new VIVO institution with an established VIVO implementation. VIVO in a box will use both VIVO Scholar (for display) and ReCiter (to import data), and the ability to customize profiles as Texas A&M does.
Roles for VIVO in a box: We all are really busy. How are we going to enhance our capacity to do something new, like developing VIVO in a box? Bruce approached Clarivate for resources. One of the ideas that can be a win-win would be to develop ReCiter to import publication data from Web of Science. This would make the ReCiter application much more widely available and be the critical link to enable VIVO in a box to ingest data.
As the VIVO LG approaches these same four considerations, goals, technical, services and roles, conversation suggested the following:
Goals – create a VIVO in a box to support the requests from smaller US schools
Technical – a discussion below described the technical difficulties to overcome. The question became what other priorities might we need to postpone to develop VIVO in a box? Also, what timeline would we consider?
Services – Clarivate would lead the service offerings for VIVO in a box, if we were able to develop a Web of Science connector for ReCiter.
Roles – committers to work on developing ReCiter’s Web of Science connector along with Benjamin Gross.
After outlining this, Bruce asked Ann, who was also in the meeting with Sam Houston State University, another new school that had approached Bruce earlier regarding its own VIVO, to give her take on the meeting, and this opportunity to develop a VIVO in a box for US schools like Sam Houston and others.
Ann: All the right people were involved in the call with Sam Houston State University; their technical team, their VP of research, their library dean, and their scholcom librarian. The library dean will talk to the Vice Provost to get funds to support this project. So how can we have the VIVO Community develop the ReCiter tool to accept resources from Web of Science? Can we get more committers from the VIVO Community to develop ReCiter?
Bruce: Ann presented a tiered model for services. Clarivate could host VIVO, or do add-ons.
Mike: Technically what is the goal – reduce 50% effort, 90% effort? What about the social contract between faculty and the VIVO team?
Paul – The Weill Cornell experience has been that faculty are too busy to provide feedback on their profiles. Early on, our goal was to offer a profile system that had polished, complete, and up-to-date profiles for users even if they didn’t touch their profiles.
Anthony – Determining what is that minimum viable product that we want. If you have certain data, this is what we can give you. If you have fewer data sources, then describe the customization needed to get them to the VIVO-In-A-Box.
Christian – Will VIVO-In-A-Box allow one to edit their profiles? Perhaps saying we’re only going to import certain data and turn off self-editing is too limiting. We have found that faculty find it very important to use a lot of the VIVO data model.
Paul – ReCiter comes with a Publication Manager application, which enables a variety of users including faculty, department administrators, and librarians to interact with their publication profile.
Beyond publications, positions, title, grants, etc, It’s worth asking should we be on the hook for representing all the different types of data. Or – should we consider “cutting off the long tail”?
Another question worth considering is if we should load data directly into VIVO RDF. Dealing with RDF is hard even for talented developers. Our preference would be to load data into a simple system and have VIVO compute the RDF.
Christian – let’s talk about how we can work together. I have three months of development for data ingest task force. Canada is also doing similar things, and we need good data ingest tools. We should support more data ingest tools at this time.
Paul – ReCiter has a library of connectors for transforming data. We currently have connectors for PubMed and for Scopus. We would definitely like to add Web of Science as an additional connector.
Bruce – Do we have agreement to move forward with ReCiter development? (Many nods in agreement.)
Ann: Can we get the data ingest task force to start meeting?
Bruce – We are running against the hour, but I will proceed to set up teams, enable the development of a road map, and discuss how to move forward.
Meeting adjourned at 12:01pm.
