Friday February 3, 2017, 2 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

 Dean B. Krafft, Eric Meeks, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio, Andi Ogier,  Mark Newton, Paul Albert 

= note taker

Ex officio

Graham Triggs, Mike Conlon, debra hanken kurtz

Regrets

 Kristi Holmes,  Bart Ragon,  Mark Fallu, Melissa Haendel

Location

Friday WebEx (updated for Feb 3)

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Conference  – all on track.  Finalizing budget with Weill.  Assessing financial risk.  Terrie Wheeler is very optimistic about publicity, attendance and sponsorship.  Call for proposals is open.  Submit today!
      1. Pre-nominations for 2018? Duke maybe. Northwestern is having some work done but they might be okay for 2019.
      2. East Coast attendance seems to be a pretty good fit
      3. Are there any universities in Canada? It's premature for us now, but I think over the next two years, we could be developing relationships with institutions there that could make 2019 viable.  Still interested in east coast for Europe and US attendees.
   2. Camp – all on track.  Registration is open.  Itinerary is available.  Tell your friends to sign up!
      1. Membership summit will be there the day before.
   3. VIVO 1.9.2 released.  Bug fixes.  See VIVO Documentation.
      1. Fix with ORCID integration plus Huda's work to bring controlled vocabularies up to date.
   4. Duraspace Strategic Partners (eventually each with their own MOU) that defines the partnership:  RDA, ORCiD, SHARE, COAR (open access repository consortium), EuroCRIS
   5. Conferences Attended and to Attend updated for 2017.  Please add conferences you think might be of interest.
   6. Internationalization Task Force forming.  Interest from Germany (TIB), Quebec (McMaster, RDC, Quebec), France (Toulouse), Latin America (IICA).  Exploratory meeting in December.

   7. Task forces:

      1. Theming: still working on put together the first meeting. Graham tried reaching out to Simon but hasn't heard back from him.

      2. Multiple language support / Internationalization: Graham needs to schedule meetings.

      3. Data loading: Mike is leading. Has been having regular meetings. Rodney, Mike, and Ted (who has left Clarivate) have met. Rodney has done a lot of work. Will put out a call for additional help. Goal: simple utility for retrieving data from PubMed or Web of Science. (Ann is looking to replace Ted's position.)

2. How often should Steering Group meet?
   1. Dean: biweekly seems good; monthly seems a little infrequent. Consensus!
   2. This time works. More consensus!
3. Strategic planning and initiatives
   1. Strategy: better product, more adoption – create a positive feedback loop:  More adoption leads to more participation which leads to a better product which leads to more adoption.
   2. Activity Insights / Digital Measures has generally been successful at pitching to upper management with a very focused message regarding improving the institution.
   3. If you're going to sell to upper management, you have to sharpen your pitch. What problem do I solve that you know you have.
   4. VIVO has almost deliberately run away from the prospect of using VIVO as a faculty reporting tool.
   5. Faculty are often defensive about data about them used for reporting. The only question is if the data will be public or not.... Open is better, local is better. Give faculty the power to control their data.
   6. We thought our tool was for connecting researchers but this hasn't happened so much. What has happened is that we do better at raising researcher's profiles. People are using Google to find researchers.... A solid RNS creates solutions to problems you didn't know you had.  Tough for executives – they want solutions to problems they know they have.
   7. The Hospital realized that every time users Google for procedures, they end up on a lab page.  Wanted better rankings.  Structure, quality helped.
   8. Cornell Ithaca: What we do with Scholars is to try to focus on analytics or discovery. Colleges can choose to opt out. We're waiting to get feedback from the new President.... There have been a lot of dog and pony shows at Ithaca. A lot of people are excited about visualizations, etc.
   9. Our VIVO is about ready to go, but we're still waiting for faculty to calm down about Elements. This was the first review cycle where faculty were asked to use Elements. This didn't go over well. The sciences hated it because they had a home-grown system. Liberal arts didn't like because it was geared towards STEM. Engineers thought that someone else should do it. We're trying to let things die down a little bit. On the plus side, our VIVO looks better every time we do a harvest.... We should have about 3,000 people in VIVO. Interestingly, the staff love the idea of VIVO.
   10. Right now, we're trying to build momentum behind our Elements so we can have a profile system ready to go. We're working with reaching out to faculty. One of the problems is the lack of a champion. There's no unified strategy.
   11. Our focus has been focusing on replacing our faculty reporting application. The goal would be to have something we can iterate on.

 Action Items