Aggie Experts

What is Aggie Experts?

The UC Davis Aggie Experts system provides a single point of discovery for research and scholarship expertise and professional information about UC Davis faculty and scholars.

Draft design of Aggie Experts homepage on laptop and mobile devices — Image of testing website, may not be indicative of final product.

Use Cases

Discover collaborators, mentors and experts
Save time on administrative tasks by reusing profile content in C.V.s, departmental websites and other applications

Timeline

With the Provost’s support, we developed Aggie Experts in a pilot with the College of Engineering. In the course of the pilot we developed a platform that integrates information about publications, grants, academic affiliation, external websites describing faculty research, and general research areas. Faculty can export their publication data as RIS files to reuse in MIV or in citation management software. We are working closely with the MIV team, and faculty will soon be able to reuse their Aggie Experts grants, too.

Rolling out the platform department by department allowed us to collect feedback that guided user interface improvements and further development, and we will continue our close work with faculty as we move past the pilot phase.

Our efforts in the near future will be focused on scaling up the platform for campus-wide use. We will be looking at how best to represent the different types of multifaceted scholarship at UC Davis, and we will be expanding support for collaboration and mentorship discovery.

What Data Sources are Used?

We use the UC Davis identity management system for the scholar’s name, title and unit affiliation. Researchers can change that information in the campus directory listing.
Publications metadata is based on scholars’ claims of publications in support of the UC Open Access Policy. Faculty can review with publications they have claimed, and what additional publications are pending their review and approval in the California Digital Library instance of Symplectic Elements publication management system.
Grant information is retrieved from the University’s data warehouse.

Researcher Expertise Registry to Combat COVID-19

To support UC Davis efforts to accelerate research around COVID-19, we rolled out an early version of researcher profiles. It included information about the research and interests of UC Davis campus members who indicated their interest to the Office of Research to find collaborators specifically for COVID-19 projects. The effort improved our understanding of developing collaborative applications and engagement with researchers. We are fully now focusing on developing and improving Aggie Experts, and this initial instance has been sunset.