I had the pleasure of attending the VIVO conference in St. Louis of the first time this year.  I think one thing that is remarkable about the VIVO community is how much it truly is a welcoming group.  From the weekly implementation calls to the face-to-face conference, you get the immediate sense that people involved truly want to work together to build the community and support around the infrastructure.  I met a lot of bright, articulate folks (and not to mention fun), and am looking forward to continuing to be a part of this vibrant community.  Special thanks to Kristi Holmes for her kind encouragement and introduction to the group.

(The above photo and more pictures from the event can be found on the VIVO Conference flickr account.)

Leading up to the conference, we blogged about the ability to incorporate VIVO profiles into PlumX.  We presented a poster showing how you can go from a VIVO profile, optionally augment it with other research outputs and secondary mentions of a researcher’s work (like mentions of their research in the popular press).  Then, our harvesting engine calculates metrics and provides both an analytics dashboard as well as visualizations. We also provide widgets that enable metrics about an artifact, person, or even department, to be embedded into other websites.  (We’ll be blogging more about the widgets in an upcoming post.)

You can see some examples of profiles built in this way through https://plu.mx/vivo.  Note that this is only a few hand-selected profiles.  If you’d like to see what a complete institution’s output looks like, you can visit https://plu.mx/smithsonian.

At the VIVO conference, the VIVO apps and tools working group was formed.  I participated in the inaugural session, and I believe it shows a lot of promise for groups like us, who are building products that leverage the investment that VIVO institutions have made in their implementation.  If you are interested in participating, be sure to check out their wiki page.