DLF Forum 2015

Presentation 1
Facilitating Researcher Discovery Across All Disciplines: Challenges and Strategies for Implementing Campus Researcher Profiles for Humanists and Social Scientists
In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of researcher profile tools to support disciplinary and interdisciplinary discovery of potential collaborators and to serve as a showcase for research. In addition to social media tools designed specifically for researchers (like Research Gate and Academia.edu) and identifier systems (like ResearcherID and ORCID), many universities have also implemented researcher profile systems to aggregate campus research, showcase university research strengths, and facilitate discovery of potential interdisciplinary collaborators both on and off campus. While ostensibly a benefit for all researchers, a majority of these implementations have focused on biomedical and STEM researchers and are often housed in a medical school or college of engineering. A number of universities also are taking a comprehensive approach to the implementation of the systems, with a scope to include faculty and scholars from the humanities and social sciences.

In this presentation, program leaders from both public and private research universities will discuss their implementations of researcher information systems, including:

• Collaboration with other campus units and faculty governance committees to define project goals and build consensus on policy issues
• Decision making about inclusion of social science and humanities faculty
• The specific challenges of identifying humanities publication information (particularly monographs) and how each institution is addressing this challenge
• Communications challenges and best practices for successful launch and promotion of campus researcher profiles

Presenters: Rebecca Bryant (University of Illinois), Ruth Allee (Northwestern University), Kate McCready (University of Minnesota). Co-author: Julie Speer (Virginia Tech)

Presentation 2
Hacking the Hydra Community
How does a nonhierarchical, distributed, open-source community work? This (15-25 minute) presentation provides an overview of Hydra's:

• Governance Model
• Communication & Collaboration Strategies
• Interest Groups and Working Groups
• Training and Education Strategy
• Funding Model (or lack thereof)
• Planning Model

Hydra is a growing community with lots of moving parts and it can appear opaque from the outside. Newcomers often complain about the lack of documentation; adopters often applaud the level of community support available. How do both of these dynamics exist at the same time and what is the community doing to maintain and grow our strengths while addressing its weaknesses.

New and potential Hydra adopters can use the information presented to become more effective participants in the community. Members of other open source communities can learn from what's worked well for us and what hasn't. We would love for the presentation to grow into a longer-term conversation about building sustainable communities around open source library initiatives.

Presenter: Mark Bussey (Hydra Steering Committee), Robin Ruggaber (University of Virginia), Declan Fleming (University California, San Diego)