BibApp 1.0: Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder

Abstract

Research institutions, particularly universities and colleges, often face challenges in understanding the range of research, publications, and collaborations occurring within their boundaries. They often struggle to keep up with the research and collaborations happening. Faculty and researchers are sometimes at a loss to find fruitful collaborations on campus. Libraries often lack the data to truly understand the publication patterns and trends among faculty. Repository managers spend much time trying to identify publications that can go into a repository. Faculty and departmental web pages are inconsistently complete and sometimes out of date; annual reporting processes are still sometimes paper-based or are not integrated into an institution-wide workflow. Grants and contracts offices generally can only provide a view of the departments that are heavily reliant on grants. There is seldom one place where an administrator, a faculty member, a funder, a potential graduate student, a subject librarian can go to better understand the research occurring on campus. Within this environment a number of tools are in development to help fill gaps in managing, displaying, searching, and mining the publication and citation data that are byproducts of the scholarly communication process. Cornell’s VIVO (http://vivo.cornell.edu/), Harvard’s Catalyst (http://catalyst.harvard.edu/), MIT’s Citeline (http://citeline.mit.edu/), and the BibApp, the subject of this paper, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin at Madison (http://bibapp.org with a pilot installation at http://connections.ideals.illinois.edu/) are all examples of such tools.