Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Communication

Description: In 2016, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries acquired an institutional membership in ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier registry. ORCID provides researchers with unique identifiers and allows publishers, funding agencies, and other systems to collect and share data about publications. In January of 2017, the UNLV Library Fellows were tasked with answering the question: would building a tool to push data into faculty ORCID profiles be an effective use of the Libraries’ resources? To answer this question, we developed a pilot project, gained permission to access faculty accounts, acquired and formatted citation and affiliation data, and used the ORCID API to push that information from our systems into the ORCID test environment. We expected to encounter challenges in later phases of the project (writing an application to automate updates, batch workflows, etc.), but were stymied by an earlier step: “get and convert data.” Our data was inconsistent, hard to convert, and of dubious utility. By July, we realized that we needed to stop wrestling with the bottleneck in our workflow and focus on moving the project forward along different lines. Though the answer to our original question was “no,” getting that answer gave us valuable insight into how the Libraries could best support ORCID uptake and use in the UNLV community. This poster will illustrate the differences between plan and execution, highlight the challenges we encountered, explain how we adapted and refocused the project, and share important lessons for institutions considering engagement with ORCID. This poster was presented at the ALA Annual Conference 2018. For more information about this project, go to: https://osf.io/mtbuw/ To see the full project report, go to: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/lib_articles/538/