In this blog series we interview members of various ORCID consortia around the world to see how they are using and benefitting from the Affiliation Manager tool. This tool is available only to ORCID consortia members and has a number of different use cases that we will be highlighting in this series. If you have a case study that you would like us to feature in this series, please reach out to Paloma Marín-Arraiza, our Manager for Global Consortia at [email protected].
The Hogeschool Utrecht (in English, the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht—UAS Utrecht) is located on campus alongside Utrecht University. As one of the largest educational institutions in the Netherlands, UAS Utrecht boasts a student body of over 35,000 and employs 3,000 dedicated professionals. Collaborating closely with Utrecht University, UAS Utrecht provides students with access to top-notch facilities and esteemed faculty members. Research is a key focus, with four knowledge centers housing 42 research groups (or lectoraten).
Hogeschool Utrecht became an ORCID member in October 2022 as part of our Dutch consortium led by SURF. It started the process of integrating ORCID institutionally using the Affiliation Manager.
In this blog, Appie Bieze, from the Team Research Support & IT at Hogeschool Utrecht shares the Applied Sciences University’s use of the Affiliation Manager.
Can you describe the type of affiliations you’re adding to the ORCID Registry using the Affiliation Manager?
We used affiliation data of current employees at our institution. Therefore, we are adding employment data to the Registry.
Why did you decide to use the Affiliation Manager? What is your use case?
We decided to start using the Affiliation Manager to get the most out of our ORCID membership. Our initial use case was adding employment affiliations for 500 researchers using the bulk upload functionality.
What was the data collection process? How did you coordinate it internally? What is your data source?
One of our development engineers wrote a script to perform a webscrape of the profile page for each researcher. The script collected the fields needed, such as their names, email addresses, and department. To complete the CSV file required to add data to the Registry using the Affiliation Manager, we later included the ROR ID of our organization and the webpage.
Did you face any challenges when using the tool? How did you overcome them?
The tool is user-friendly. We also found the guide helpful. However, we invested time to ensure the CSV file was correct. This was mainly due to the column separation, which was made by semicolons in our spreadsheet software instead of commas, as required by the tool.
What worked when communicating with researchers? What insights did you gain or lessons did you learn?
Over the course of six months, we maintained frequent communication, which greatly helped our progress. Additionally, the fact that 35% of the researchers were already using ORCID further facilitated the process.
How do you plan to keep using the tool? Are you planning regular updates?
As part of our plans, we have included updates every three months, specifically for newly onboarded staff members. Our commitment extends to actively reaching out to these new researchers, ensuring they feel valued and understood within our community.
Separately, our plan includes several proactive steps to enhance our engagement with researchers. First, we will compile a list of researchers who have not responded to our previous outreach efforts and re-establish contact with them in autumn (beginning of the academic year). Additionally, we’ll focus on identifying researchers who have set their accounts to private, as some may not be aware of this status, and we want to ensure they receive the support they need. To further support new researchers, we will introduce specialized “Warm Welcome Courses,” where we will emphasize the importance of ORCID and its possibilities. As a final touch, we plan to incorporate an easily accessible ORCID button on their profile pages, simplifying their experience and enhancing their connection with our platform.
Do you have any recommendations you would like to share with other members planning to use the tool?
We recommend other members to begin with the correct source data to ensure accurate results.
What is your one key takeaway that you want to share about your experience?
Our key takeaway from the experience is that it was very efficient overall. We didn’t encounter any special issue communicating with our researchers and their response was positive overall.
Contributor
Appie Bieze
Appie Bieze graduated in Political Sciences and found himself working in the world of (scientific) libraries. In the last few years, he joined the Team Research Support & IT at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, the Netherlands. His job focuses on account management of software tools supporting Research. The growing demand for managing outputs made the institution decide to join the Dutch ORCID consortium.
