Focus on Research and T-Space :

Tools for promoting and preserving your research

Overview

• What are Focus on Research and T-Space?

• Tour of the web sites• How Focus and T-Space work together

Focus on Research• Web- based research gateway for faculty to:• create and promote research profiles• highlight your research publications and activities• Features:• easy tools for creating profiles and importing

publications• integration to put Focus data into other web sites• links to full text, tag clouds, co-authors, research time

lines • BibApp software framework• Open source: Ruby on Rails, Java, lucene, SOLR,

MySQL:• Developed by U Illinois UC and U Wisconsin Madison

Focus on Research home page

Focus onResearchfaculty page

Focus onResearchworks page

Focus onResearchgroup page

Benefits for faculty• Easy to make attractive research profiles• Others can find your profiles through

– Focus website– RSS feeds in other websites– Google search

• You can self-manage your profile

Benefits to community

• Helps researchers to find collaborators• Helps students to find mentors• Enables departments to profile all of their

scholarly output.

Institutional Partnerships• University of Toronto Office of Research:

– tracks and promotes university research & researchers– lots of data, but needs strong framework for it all

• Library:– Focus on Research + T-Space + catalogue

= strong framework for discovery and preservation– Needs lots of data for this framework

• Variety of models to assist faculty in creating profiles:– Liaison librarians; library staff; work-study students;

administrative assistants• Together we hope to build a strong researcher tool

But what about…

• Web-based CV tools– Different, but intersecting purpose– Connect the tools: one data entry, multiple

uses• Faculty profiles on departmental web sites

– Can use Focus data to feed departmental profiles

– Rich tool set behind the Focus information

Integration withT-Space:

Our institutionalresearch repository

T-Space• Web- based institutional research repository that allows:

– Scholars to transmit and preserve their research– Library to capture, preserve and distribute university’s scholarly

output

• Features:– Tools for importing, managing, and harvesting data– Accepts many digital formats: documents, presentations,

spreadsheets, image, sound, data, etc.

• Status– In production since 2003– Contains 28,500 documents including 9,400 theses

• Stable, permanent home for research – in self-defined communities – choose access: U of T-only or world accessible

• Easy and increased access to research– persistent URLs (DOIs) – preferential Google indexing– citation rates typically increase dramatically

• Assurance that research will be preserved– commitment to migration and refreshment

(formats)– stable institutional servers

Benefits for faculty

Focus documentpage

T-Space corresponding documentpage

Contact

Sarah Forbes

focus@library.utoronto.ca

416-946-0114

http://focus.library.utoronto.ca

Join us for the final workshop:

IMPACT FACTORS

January 28 | 4-5 pm | UTSC Instructional Centre, IC 302

January 29 | 4-5 pm | Gerstein Science Information Centre, Alice Moulton Room

January 30 | 4-5 pm | UTM Library, T-Room