Library as Campus Research Partner: UC San Diego Library's Research Outputs Dashboard
Abstract
This presentation will introduce UC San Diego Library's campus research outputs data dashboard. The interactive dashboard provides a novel, library-centric view of UC San Diego's scholarly ecosystem by consolidating and visualizing data from multiple sources across campus and the UC system.The dashboard began as a proof of concept to better visualize and advertise UC San Diego researcher outputs available in Dimensions, a campus-licensed research intelligence platform that aggregates metadata and metrics about publications, grants, datasets, and patents. The Library’s Research Data Curation group had been receiving questions from campus partners about researcher collaboration, departmental publication counts, and other research metrics, and while answers to these questions could be found in Dimensions, the process was time-consuming and required enough technical expertise to be challenging.We realized that what we needed was a flexible, multi-purpose dashboard that could address most internal and external stakeholder use cases, using data from Dimensions and other campus sources. And in a time of budget cuts, we could use this dashboard as a way to re-center the Library as critical partner in the research landscape on campus, showcasing our value in a way that would scale better than boutique research metric support.Along with a student employee for technical work, we developed a robust and maintainable workflow to analyze, visualize, share, and store UC San Diego-specific data from Dimensions and other campus and UC-wide sources. This presentation will demo the dashboard functionality and discuss how it can support internal library use cases as well as those from campus stakeholders. We hope this dashboard will help campus better understand and appreciate how the Library fits into the research data lifecycle, especially journal access, publication, and data sharing.