An integrated approach to Researcher Portfolio and Institutional Repository in NIMS eSciDoc

The researcher directory is one of the most important communication services for research institutes. National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) aims to provide the service that assists researchers to appeal themselves and their research activities to be discovered as potential research partners by other institutes and corporate companies in Japan and overseas. Such communications are also beneficial to individual researchers for finding new research ideas via new contacts.
The Digital Library Project at National Institutes for Materials Science (NIMS), started in April 2008, consists of two main systems, a digital repository system and an extracting system of researcher portfolio. A key concept of the researcher portfolio system is to integrate several internal databases that are originally designed for organizational management, personnel database, evaluation database for individual research achievements and others. We have developed a data mapping system that integrates such several databases and systematically extracts individual researcher information and research outcomes. We have collected information of the about 700 researchers, systematize whole data flow and developed user interfaces that allow users to edit and update their information. In the implementation of the institutional repository, “researcher portfolio” provides the auto-suggestion function when article data is submitted, and such convenient function helps promotion of self-archiving. Additionally, the system supports the export function for the external researcher databases via XML-RPC API or XML data file exchange for three services: ResearcherID.com (Thomson Reuters), Researcher Name Resolver (NII), and ReaD (JST). These export functions improve visibility of the researchers.