Print a CV or biosketch

back up to User Stories: Defining features and functionality VIVO needs - September 2011

User types involved

• Faculty user type
• Researcher user type

Narrative User Story (for sharing/review/voting)

A user with an existing profile should be able to:

• log into VIVO;
• find a link to a CV/biosketch generation mechanism, either through the common navigation or directly on a Person-type object page;
• click the link to have an editable NIH biosketch-style document representation of the VIVO profile download to the user's computer.

Background

Faculty and researchers frequently need to generate a CV or biosketch for a variety of purposes, including submission for new grants. These documents typically contain educational background, personal statements, positions, honors, a listing of relevant peer-reviewed publications, and a list of research projects. Because VIVO contains much of this data about a person from institutional systems of record, it is a natural fit to provide a "first pass" biosketch or CV, so that the faculty member or researcher may be able to tailor the outputs specifically for the project in need of it.

Wish list for improvement

• The ability to select a template when export is occurring (so that both CVs and Biosketches can be offered). – if templates can be saved, it should be possible to select a saved on at the start of the process
• A template format that can be modified by system administrators, so that institutions can structure the outputted document in an institutionally preferred format. – Digital Vita code uses Apache FOP library; templates are XSLT files that can be modified and saved
• A wizard to assist in the creation of the Biosketch, so that the output can be closer to a final result. The wizard could allow functions such as pre-selecting relevant publications or research projects. – this is the missing application piece; if this is written outside of VIVO it could work for VIVO-compatible RDF from any source
• Warnings when a user's profile exceeds the NIH limits for a biosketch (more than 4 pages, more than 15 publications, etc.) – an enhancement

Technical considerations

While it would be ideal that a biosketch could be 100% generated directly out of VIVO, chances are that the data in an automatically generated biosketch will need to be edited or massaged by faculty or their designates. As such, common editable document formats (e.g. Word, RTF, Plaintext) should be preferred over read-only or uncommon formats (e.g. PDF, LaTex). – The Apache FOP library puts out either RTF or PDF

Only Person-class objects should be able to have biosketches exported; while encapsulating the information about a Department might be useful, these documents are typically not necessary for them. – this is easily configured

A research coordinator who is collecting biosketches for a grant submission may need to be able to retrieve biosketches for researchers they do not have proxy editing access to. Because the VIVO data is (generally) publicly available, anyone with access to a profile page should be able to pull down a biosketch. – I would argue that this should be true for a saved biosketch format, where the person who's profile it is has been able to indicate the most relevant publications and write the narrative specific to a biosketch

Priority or staging considerations

Some work towards this goal has already been accomplished as part of Digital Vita Docs (DV Docs) for VIVO. This work lacks the interface to specify any customization of the CV or biosketch, including identifying particular publications to list (or not) and writing a narrative specific to the biosketch. There has been debate within the VIVO community over whether these enhancements should become part of VIVO or of a separate application that could be fed data compatible with the VIVO ontology from any source, including Harvard Profiles.

This is generally considered to be a "killer app" for VIVO and could drive adoption and use across many academic institutions.