 Hi there. On behalf of the University Libraries, welcome to Ohio University. As you begin your graduate career, the Libraries encourages you to sign up for an ORCID Record. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier. Essentially, ORCID Records are a unique digital identifier that will distinguish you from other scholars. Creating your ORCID Record is a free and easy way to digitally consolidate all of your employment, education, research, and grant funding into a single digital location. Think of your ORCID Record as a digital resume or CV you can use to promote yourself. Scholars often use their ORCID Record to promote themselves by including it in their email signature, journal articles, conference presentations, and even in job applications. Your ORCID Identifier is a persistent record of your academic achievements that you have complete control over. Rest assured, you control who can see what information from your record. When you create your ORCID Record while here at Ohio University, it will follow you wherever your career takes you. You can continue to build upon it as you progress through your career. Once you leave Ohio University, you'll just need to update the education and employment sections of your profile. During your graduate career here at Ohio University, you might co-author an article or present on some of your research. You might even present a poster at a conference in your discipline. All of these can be included in your profile. Some graduate students even include the data they collect and publish for their thesis or dissertation. Once completed, you can even include your thesis or dissertation. It isn't just data or articles that can be included into your profile. A wide variety of scholarly and creative works can be included. These different works may include patents, artistic performances, technical standards, lectures, and software are all among the many different output types that are welcome to be placed in your ORCID Record. No matter what your scholarly and creative outputs may be, you are able to manually input them into your ORCID Record or you can automatically import them from aggregators such as Scopus or publication linking sites like Crossref. ORCID allows you to enter a variety of names that you go by. There are many reasons why a scholar might change names or have aliases during their lifetime. ORCID allows you to add variations of your name to your profile to ensure that your named identities are all included. Someone might be published under several iterations of their name. For example, John Smith, John D. Smith, John David Smith, or J. D. Smith or even if John identifies differently later in their career and becomes Joanna Smith. All the variations of a scholar's name can be included within the same ORCID Record. The ORCID platform also supports non-Latin characters to be more inclusive of non-English names. To sign up for an ORCID profile, you simply need to go to ORCID.org and click on Sign In Register at the top right-hand corner. From there, you can either sign in using your Google account or you can click on Access through your institution. You will then be given step-by-step directions to create your account. We recommend that you access ORCID through Ohio University. This allows the University Libraries to verify your ORCID profile. Although not required, it does make it clear to others that you are in fact part of the Ohio University community. Think of this as the coveted blue checkmark that verifies users on social media. Once you create your ORCID account, we recommend that you don't stop there. To get the most of your ORCID profile, you should spend a little time filling out the different sections. At a minimum, you should fill out the Education and Employment sections. This makes it easier for others to find your record. Overall, your scholarly identity is as unique as you are and ORCID helps you create a lasting record to consolidate all of your accomplishments. Please feel free to contact the University Libraries that you have any questions or need help.