Repository feeds on university staff profile webpages: some examples

Posted on March 28th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

There is a project going on at the University of Lincoln at the moment to rebuild our directory of academic staff profiles on the web, in line with our new corporate website.

As I mentioned in my presentation to library managers last week, it’s turning out to be a nice example of how new web applications can be spun up quickly at Lincoln using our existing [open and non-open] data sources (in this case, HR staff data, BuddyPress social profile data, Repository feeds, Gravatar images, and our OAuth authentication framework/Common Web Design), plus a bit of developer magic.

Screenshot of the new staff directory

You can search our staff profile directory (still in development) at: http://phone.online.lincoln.ac.uk/

There is a growing tendency for universities in all groupings—certainly for the research-intensive universities—to publish the entirety of an author’s publications to their web profile as embedded content from their repository and/or Current Research Information System (CRIS). Here are a few examples of staff profiles on other UK universities’ sites which incorporate publication lists derived from their repositories or CRISes:

We’re pulling the publication details from the Lincoln Repository for each author into their web profile (example), using a search on their University of Lincoln staff ID (which forms part of their standard HR data profile) – e.g. http://lncn.eu/ep/000157. We can then get at the Repository data in almost any format we want (BibTeX, JSON, XML, RSS, etc.). I’m also keeping a close eye on the development of the EPrints Shelves plugin, which might be an interesting tool for giving authors more flexibility and control over how their Repository publication list(s) are displayed on their web profile.

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One Response to “Repository feeds on university staff profile webpages: some examples”

  1. Chris Keene says:

    Quick note to say that Sussex now uses it’s IR (Sussex Research Online) to show publications in academic web profiles

    Example
    http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/10641

    There is a flag next to each author’s name for each item to allow them to select if they want it on their web profile or not.

    Chris