The Library-Led Research Information Management System at Oklahoma State University: Collaborations, Successes, and Challenges

The Oklahoma State University (OSU) Library led the university-wide implementation of a Research Information Management (RIM) system, a platform providing a single source of data on faculty biographical information, research publications, teaching, grants, and other scholarly output. This has required developing crosswalks for data in multiple existing systems, harvesting bibliographic metadata, wrangling messy data, and using ORCID, Scopus, Crossref, and RIM system APIs. Consultations with members of the campus community, including the research office, university administration, faculty, HR, and others, were vital to the process. This presentation will focus on the library’s collaboration with campus IT and some of the issues, challenges, and successes the library encountered while developing the grants, HR, and teaching feeds. Examples include managing privacy and security considerations, working with data that was not created with the intention of being publicly surfaced, creating processes for mapping data from one system to another, and balancing relationships between the vendor and various campus stakeholders.