 I'm Rebecca Bryant from OCLC Research and I'm joined in this presentation today by Bruce Herbert from Texas A&M University. And we're going to be talking about what RIM systems are and what VIVO is and how it supports RIM practices. So what is research information management? In a recent OCLC research report, we defined research information management systems as those that support the transparent aggregation, curation and utilization of data about institutional research activities. Set in a different way, this is a way for institutions to curate its own institutional scholarly record. This definition of research information management was one of the findings of a recent OCLC research report came out in late 2021 in two parts. And the project was led by myself and Jan Fransen with support from Pablo de Castro at Urochris, Brenna Helmstutler from Syracuse University and Dave Scherer from Carnegie Mellon University. This project pursued a case study approach investigating the RIM practices at these five case study institutions. And we chose these institutions because they represented a diversity of uses, RIM products and services, scale as well as stakeholders involved in the RIM implementation. And altogether we conducted semi-structured interviews with 39 individuals at eight institutions. The report is freely available at the link you see here. We offered six high-level RIM use cases that we observed in these case study institutions. The first and really widely used is the use of a public portal use case. Public profiles are used to support expertise discovery, reputation management, and in some cases to also support economic development at the local and state levels. We also found RIM systems could be used for metadata reuse to support population of faculty webpages or directory information. And RIM systems can also be used for strategic reporting and decision support through reports, visualizations, and dashboards. So examples may include reports for accreditation, grant preparation, and strategic planning. RIM systems can also be used to support workflows for annual review and promotion and tenure. I mean, think about it, they include a lot of the same information, although these systems are often completely separate from maybe the one used for a public portal. And they can be used to support open access workflows, streamlining the processes for depositing open access content and harmonizing metadata between the RIM system and the local repository. And finally, they can be used for compliance monitoring. This is a really important use case in the European arena. We only saw it in just one small way in one institution, but it's an area we may see grow in the future. Another finding of our report was this RIM system framework, which describes how data can come into the system from publication databases as well as local sources, through a publication harvester or data entry into a core data store, which then through data transfer methods such as APIs can be used by a number of data consumers. These data consumers are really these six high level RIM use cases we described in the report. So let me emphasize just some high level findings we had from this report. Not surprising to anybody listening, the US landscape is characterized by decentralization and duplication. There are a lot of stakeholders, they're all solving their own problems. And as a result, most institutions have more than one RIM system, and they probably don't talk to each other. Also, there's a lot of confusion about what RIM systems are. There are a lot of three and four letter acronyms out there, and a lot of different stakeholders use different terminology. We want to bring them all under the central RIM umbrella. RIM systems can support an array of high level use cases, and there are also no national mandates in the US that are driving RIM practice as we see in Europe. And that's really for this why we have sort of such a lot of confusion and mess here in the US. I want to conclude by saying that libraries are important stakeholders. They possess a lot of expertise around publication metadata and scholarly communication that no other stakeholder on campus has. So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Bruce to talk about Vivo in particular. Thank you, Rebecca. It's good to see you. So everybody, my name is Bruce Herbert. I am the former director of the Office of Scholar Communications here at Texas A&M. I'm a professor of agriculture, and I also have the pleasure of chairing the Vivo leadership group that provides governance to the open source Vivo community. So Rebecca in her report highlighted a really important finding that has deep implications for Texas A&M. And I imagine for many other universities. While many universities have found ways of integrating their data about student education, student academic success, in a range of systems that allow that data to serve strategic decision making at the campuses, in many universities that I'm aware of and certainly here at Texas A&M, our research data is siloed in a lot of different both internal and external systems that people have access to. That data is not governed by some policies that allow a clear and consistent ability to get access and use that data in day-to-day operations and in terms of strategic decision making. And so this becomes a real problem as universities try to maximize their funding and the impact and significance of their research. RIM systems, as Rebecca highlighted, research information management systems can often act as hubs for many of these siloed systems through four consistent strategies. The first is a consistent use of persistent identifiers in the systems for people, objects and institutions. A reasonably consistent data model or ontologies across the system so that data can be shared and classified in fairly consistent way. Also, these systems generally need to have some kind of API so that the data can be automatically shared across the systems. And finally, as we've seen at Texas A&M, a good data governance policies that balances both openness and security is key to the effective use of this kind of data. The Vivo open source software represents one of the world's great RIM systems that's available. Vivo is a member-supported open source community that is supported by the nonprofit group Lyrisis. It's an open source RIM system built by, for and with communities in mind. Vivo is characterized by being customizable and that includes the ontology, which is really important when you're bringing in a wide range of both commercial, homegrown and open source products that store research data at an institution. It allows institutions to own and control their own data because it's an open source product that's going to be administered and implemented on campus. That was certainly something that was very important to Texas A&M as we implemented our own RIM, which we have branded scholars at Texas A&M. And Vivo represents a semantic top technology that is directly supporting the growth of the knowledge graph and other open science practices around the world. The Vivo community is guided by three central core values. The software is open source. The community is an open, transparent community that many others can join. And Vivo supports open data where we are providing linked open data that's easily shared and combined across Vivo sites as I mentioned, directly supporting the growth of that knowledge graph about research around the world. The Vivo community has been quite active over the last two years, even during the pandemic, where we have been trying to focus on the development of our software in terms of three particular characteristics. One is we are very focused on enhancing the usability and utility of the Vivo system, particularly through the development of a dynamic API. Our software continues to evolve in several important ways. We just are in a process of testing among the community members. Our latest release that includes internationalization and a host of other features as I'll show. And we're trying to improve the interoperability of Vivo with other important systems and other important communities. So we have projects that are aligning the European Serif framework, which is a framework that's used to guide the development of ontologies that define research and its products and people and organizations that are associated with it. We're aligning that Serif standard with the Vivo ontology. And this is going to provide important ways to allow Vivo to both serve and work with the European Union. We have a project that's ongoing that's trying to integrate and enhance the interoperability between the open source D space repository and the Vivo RIM system. D space is another community program of the lyricist organization and very, very popular around the world, used primarily for the curation and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. And in most universities that run D space, linking it to a Vivo system has provided real capabilities and enhanced features that serve both faculty and the organization. And finally, we're also looking to enhance interoperability with Fedora and Orchid as two other community programs in lyricist portfolio, where Fedora is serving as a collection system for digital collections. Orchid, of course, is one of the world's most important PIDs for ID's for researchers and we're embedding those systems within the Vivo operating system. As we look at the development of Vivo, one of the main things that we're focused on is the development of a dynamic API. And because it will have some clear advantages in terms of implementing and building a Vivo at a particular university. The first, of course, is that it will allow us to decouple our front end and back end and allow much easier customization of the Vivo system, including custom entry forms for data entry, providing new interesting web interfaces to allow users and others to interact with the data within the Vivo system. And it will provide and support better integration with external applications like D space and other systems. As I mentioned before, Vivo 1.13 has been released for community testing. This has a range of features that have been requested by the Vivo community, including new functionalities, upload files, the link with individual Vivos, password authentication, sparkle endpoints and updated API. It has an online translator editor that enhances the use of Vivo for Slavic language institutions. You can delete individuals and their related information easier and other minor improvements. But certainly we are accelerating the pace of development and this has been in the last two years with third release of a new Vivo system in my time as chair. As I mentioned, the Vivo community is really interested in working with the European Union communities, particularly the Eurochris organization. The Eurochris organization is a European Union organization that's focused on the development of CRIS or RIM systems. A RIM system research information management system, a CRIS, represents a current research information system. They're not exactly the same as Rebecca mentioned, but they're close. But the Vivo community has an existing MOU with the Eurochris community and our major project right now is aligning the CERIF framework with the Vivo ontology, allowing the data to be interchanged between CRIS systems and the Vivo RIM system. We are collaborating on other areas and trying to identify other areas of interoperability that will enhance the functionality of our mutual systems. We are building collaborations with the Eurochris community in order to just learn from each other and we are attending mutual conferences. So in fact, early this spring the Eurochris meeting was in Croatia first trip anywhere since the pandemic started. It was really nice. So that's pretty cool. The benefit of this mapping project, the CERIF framework to Vivo ontology, is that of course this is a very important project. It provides greater interoperability between Vivo platforms and the CERIF compatible CRIS systems. It also helps us build knowledge and transfer knowledge between the two communities. We are actually improving both the CERIF framework and the Vivo ontology. We're extending those data models to new needs and new situations. And we are doing this machine executable mapping for lots of different purposes. So it's a pretty exciting time in that project in the Vivo community. And we appreciate that collaboration. Another project that we've been working on that I mentioned is the interoperability of dSpace and Vivo. dSpace being the probably the most common open source repository in the world. Where Vivo can act as a front end for dSpace instances at a particular institution, allowing the dSpace to curate documents and data sets and other things that might be generated during research activities and then representing them within the Vivo system. So through automatic harvesting of that metadata. So this is a really cool project. And we're pretty excited about this as our first step to building an interoperable set of tools, open source tools that would support the research life cycle. The Vivo community itself continues to grow. We've recently welcomed the Berlin Alliance with just six universities in the Berlin that are centers of excellence that have recently been funded by the EU as they build that. And we have a new project down in Brazil that is trying to build a national Chris system for the entire country using the Vivo system. And so that's all pretty exciting. Lots of European universities and North American universities using Vivo as their primary system. And right now, probably our greatest growth is in Central America and South America. As communities down there seek more open infrastructure to support their move to open access and open science. The Vivo community is quite active even during a pandemic, which meant we spent a lot of time on Zoom. But we've had both our conferences. We have several different user groups that are less the conference and more just a sharing of best practices. We are collaborating with the Eurochrist meeting in 2022 where we had a whole Vivo track that was really well attended. And so on. And we're planning another Vivo conference in 2023, which is actually quite exciting. Really cool. So if you are interested in learning more about the Vivo community or the Vivo system, feel free to reach out either to myself or my colleagues, Anna. And you can find a lot of information about Vivo on our wiki that is in large part the way we share information with the world. It's a thriving interest and collaborative community full of really smart people. And that makes it actually quite fun. Okay. So with that, I'll end and thank you again for Rebecca Bryant for the insights from our OCLC report. Thank you.