The following post is part of a series based upon the OCLC Research Information Management in the US reports.
The recently published OCLC Research report series Research Information Management in the United States documents the RIM practices at five case study institutions:
- Penn State University
- Texas A&M University
- Virginia Tech
- UCLA
- University of Miami.
Evidence for the report was collected through semi-structured interviews with 39 individuals in 23 separate interviews in late 2020 and early 2021, and the reports document institutional efforts to aggregate, curate, and utilize data about institutional research activities, embracing multiple use cases, products, and stakeholders.

Our reports document six discrete RIM use cases as well as the stakeholders and units with administrative responsibility. Across five of the six use cases, the library is a principal stakeholder, often demonstrating significant administrative responsibility at the institutions profiled. A key finding is that the library is an essential stakeholder in enterprise RIM practices.
Why is the library such a valuable stakeholder in RIM?
The simple answer is that librarians possess extensive expertise in publications metadata, a foundation of knowledge about the complex publications information in RIM systems that no other stakeholder on campus can claim. This is particularly important when RIM system data is used for strategic reporting and decision support, as the data must be sufficiently complete, accurate, well-curated, deduplicated, granular, transparent, and trustworthy. And furthermore, you can’t have good interoperability without good data.
Breaking this down even further, we have found that the library and librarians:
- Are experts in an extensive array of publication databases and indexes that can serve as data sources for RIM systems. They are knowledgeable about the coverage, gaps, and accessibility, and can advise on the opportunities for harvesting licensed or open content from one or more sources.
- Know about, support, and use the standards, persistent identifiers (PIDs), and vocabularies that can support disambiguation and duplicate management—of publications, authors, and institutions. For example,
- Libraries are playing an active role in educating researchers about the ORCID researcher identifier and encouraging integration into institutional systems. Following several years of library leadership, the faculty senate at Stanford University voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution in support of ORCID adoption by Stanford scholars.
- At University of Miami, librarians are enriching person profiles in the Scholarship@Miami platform with as many author identifiers as possible, to ensure the connection of the right people with the right works, and optimize accurate publication metadata harvesting at scale.
- The California Digital Library is a principal partner in the launch of the community-led Research Organization Registry (ROR), to support the disambiguation of institution names.
- Can advise on the complex licensing and intellectual property issues that exist in scholarly communications, with implications for metadata availability and reuse. Additionally, libraries may have pre-existing relationships and licensing agreements with RIM vendors.
- Are advocates for complete, well-curated metadata and have the skills to support this. For example,
- The Penn State University Libraries manage the Activity Insight system for faculty activity reporting. In addition to system administration, institutional leadership, and training, the Libraries also offer a CV Service for faculty members going up for promotion, where a trained library staff member enters information from the faculty member’s CV into the RIM system. In addition to being an appreciated service by faculty, the Libraries offers this service because it can more easily ensure the accuracy of the data, making it fit for later reuse purposes.
- Are leaders in efforts to support unpaywalled, open access to scholarly content, often through institutional repositories (IRs). The functionality and content of RIM and IR systems overlap, and a previous OCLC Research report observed increasing interoperability and merging of RIM and IR product categories, particularly in environments like the UK with strong national public access policies.[1] We also observed this in two of our project case studies:
- The California Digital Library implemented the UC Publication Management System beginning in 2014 to support system-wide open access policies. The UCPMS streamlines researcher compliance by identifying UC-affiliated publications, communicating with faculty, and supporting a streamlined and user-friendly workflow for depositing this content into the eScholarship repository.
- Penn State Libraries similarly developed the Researcher Metadata Database to power a workflow to help authors more conveniently comply with university policy. Authors are notified of publications that are not already in an OA repository and can deposit the appropriate version into the ScholarSphere repository.
- Are adopting new roles to support institutional bibliometrics and research impact analysis, as research universities increasingly need to quantify research impact for a spectrum of internal and external purposes. For example,
- The University of Waterloo bibliometrics and research impact librarian supports institutional strategic planning with bibliometric indicators, validates university rankings data, and provides consultation and expert guidance to others using bibliometric tools in a growing institutional community of practice.
- Virginia Tech Libraries are using research analytics to identify possible industry partners, as well as understand the characteristics and impact of the university’s research output.
- Have a strong culture of collaboration. This is exemplified in numerous ways, including the OCLC library cooperative comprised of thousands of libraries worldwide. Through OCLC, member libraries maintain the world’s largest library catalog, WorldCat, increasing the discoverability, access, and sharing of knowledge.
It would be a mistake to implement or manage a RIM system without the library’s full involvement.
Publication metadata is an institutional asset
Universities have long dedicated significant effort and resources in the meticulous management of student registration and academic history data. Today, advancing technologies, standards, and networked information make it possible to also collect and curate the publications and other research outputs—research information—that constitute the institutional scholarly record. It wasn’t long ago that this content was stubbornly confined to the pages of each faculty member’s CV.
Publication metadata is a university asset, and like student, finance, and HR information, it should be included in campus-wide data governance and stewardship efforts, where access is facilitated and controlled, providing a convenient decision support platform for academic and administrative decision makers. We observed this exemplified in the University DataCommons (UDC) at Virginia Tech. A well-curated institutional bibliography, when combined with other internal and external data sources, can offer significant and granular insights into the relative strengths, growth, and opportunities for the institution.
Metadata management skills extend beyond managing publications but also inform the attention required for managing other entities such as externally funded projects or research equipment. The ultimate goal is to support the infrastructure and processes for stewarding an array of well-curated entities and their relationships–researchers to publications to grants to projects to institutions and beyond.
We expect research information management to be an area of increasing investment for universities for the foreseeable future. And for libraries to be valuable partners in this space.
[1] The national-level REF2021 Open Access policy at https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1228/open_access_summary__v1_0.pdf requires the deposit in an institutional system of full-text accepted manuscripts for research articles and conference papers no longer than three months since manuscript acceptance.
Rebecca Bryant, PhD (she/her), previously worked as a university administrator and as community director at ORCID. Today she applies that experience in her role as Senior Program Officer with the OCLC Research Library Partnership, conducting research and developing programming to support 21st century libraries and their parent institutions.