VIVO Conference Workshop Proposal Deadline is April 1

Interested in developing and presenting a workshop at this year’s VIVO conference in August? The deadline for proposals is this Friday. We are looking for high quality, engaging workshops (half day or whole day) regarding adoption, implementation, outreach, development, visualization and data ingest. To apply, please send your proposal to Kristi Holmes (holmeskr@wusm.wustl.edu )

VIVO Publications

Have you submitted or published a peer reviewed paper regarding VIVO? Are you planning to? We need a complete list of all papers submitted or published during the grant period for inclusion in our final report. If you have a paper published or submitted, please contact Leslie McIntosh (lmcintosh@path.wustl.edu) for inclusion of citation information in the annual report.

Adoption of VIVO

As we all know, VIVO is open source software, available for download. There have been many downloads. Our documents are moving to the open to help establish our open source community. Our development processes are opening up as well.

In the end, building a national network requires that institutions adopt VIVO – that is, institutions make a high-level decision to run VIVO, support it at the local level, fill it full of data and maintain the data. They decide to support their faculty in the use of the software. This is clearly a big commitment.

Labs, libraries, research groups and others cannot decide to adopt VIVO for their institution. They can be thought leaders and they can provide local samples of what an implementation might look like. In the end, provosts, VPs for Research and just a few others are able to make such decisions.

We find that a decision to adopt VIVO takes about a year (plus or minus many months)– there is much to consider and many questions to be answered. As we talk to colleagues at schools considering VIVO, we need to help answer questions such as benefit now and in the future, effort to implement, and policy questions to be addressed. Some institutions have considerable experience and mature processes for answering such questions. Many do not.

Talking about VIVO to senior leadership requires preparation, and a strong case. At the Value-Added Services workshop last week, preparing for this conversation was seen as a top challenge and one we will address quickly. I will work with workshop members and others to develop materials for library directors and others in their conversations with institutional decision makers.

Today I met with the VIVO team at the University of Colorado, Boulder. They have adopted VIVO. They have a strong team, working from the Provost’s office, committed to a full implementation. They have a strong project plan and realistic expectations. They are interested in extending VIVO to other schools in Colorado. Their test implementation (version 1.2) includes all their faculty.

In Bloomington, I met Melanie Gardner who is leading the VIVO implementation for the USDA. The USDA has a roadmap to add 50,000 researchers and scientists to their VIVO implementation.
Other schools and groups are making adoption decisions. We are providing materials, answering questions, and assisting in every way we can with adoption processes across the country. Expect more announcements of adoptions in the coming months.

Ideas for VIVO Notes?

Is there an idea that you would like to see developed in VIVO Notes? Do you have questions or concerns that might best be presented here? Please drop me a note.
Mike Conlon