Posts Tagged ‘BuddyPress’

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.

Old site, new site

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp

Screenshot of a page from my old websiteI’ve decided to start maintaining again my personal website, mainly as a register of all the little bits of work I get involved in. This does mean it might not always make fascinating reading (unless you’re transfixed by digital library management and development…), but at least I’ll have a permanent record of things to refer back to.

My original website was a series of plain HTML documents; now instead of maintaining my own installation of WordPress I’m using the University of Lincoln’s (i.e. my employer’s) WordPress MU / BuddyPress server at blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, but mapped to my own domain. This way I can participate in the social-networking features of BuddyPress, while still maintaining my own, personal online presence outside the University.