Elements Training Videos
As part of our transition from Digital Measures to Elements, the faculty affairs team coordinated with Barbara Lockee from the provost's office to conduct training on Elements. This page contains one such training, broken down into 20 segments for your convenience. Please peruse the list below to find the video you need. Each segment is less than 11 minutes long, with most being less than 5 minutes.
- Opening
- Background on versions
- Every faculty member has access to Elements
- VTechWorks
- Editing your profile
- Managing delegates
- Auto claiming settings and name based searches
- Workspace
- Profile page
- Elements reporting
- Reviewing and managing your records
- Correcting automated records
- Pending, rejected, claimed records, and summaries
- Adding a record
- Grants
- Professional activities - service and outreach
- Exporting records
- Teaching
- Merging records and managing privacy at the record level
- Reporting and the University Data Commons
Thank you all for joining us here and I'm going to keep my eye on the participant list here and let some other folks in but it's great to be with you this morning. I'm Barbara Lockee. I'm a professor in the School of Education in the the Instructional Design and Technology program. And I'm also working in the office of faculty affairs in the provost's office at Virginia Tech. And mostly my work there centers on what we're doing this morning. The support of Elementsand and helping faculty and staff and administrators around campus become familiar with it and work out its use within different colleges and and departments. And we've been working with Brendle and Joalenn Tabor and Dr. Musick and Vianne Greek and, and others that I'm sure I haven’t mentioned and many other folks in the background to, to shift the School of Medicine from Digital Measures to the use of Elements, which is the Faculty Activity Repository that we're going to show you this morning. If you're familiar with Digital Measures, I'm sure most of you are, Elements and similar and in terms of functionality. So hopefully that will be helpful.
It we've been using it on campus probably for about I'd say this, we'll start our ninth year using it for a couple of colleges. Actually three colleges have used it in a fairly consistent way. Now all, all colleges are moving toward using it. So to become a central repository of all the faculty activity in terms of scholarship and grants and teaching and professional activity.
So anyway, it's been a pleasure to work with. The, the Elements is the Digital Measures slash Elements team in the School of Medicine. It's been about three years, hasn’t it Brendle? to coordinate this shift. So anyway, the just in terms of timing, we plan to switch everything over to Elements from Digital Measures as soon as we get back from the holiday break in January. So I know you've had access to the test environment. That access will remain and you can certainly look at and access elements, if you have a PID, Virginia Tech PID, you can access the production version, the version that we're all are using that I'll show you today, anytime.
But, but in terms of accessing your current information, all that, the database will accept, Digital Measures will, will be shutting that down in terms of taking new information in toward the end of December. And then and then you'll have a current snapshot of everything once you login and after the holiday break.
Brendle, do you want to say anything else about that? Have I left any important information out about that timing.
[BRENDLE]: No, so the thing that I would just add as we have been throughout the past year, transferring everybody's data over from Digital Measures to Elements. So we're still in the process of doing that. And like she's said, it should all be… Anything that you already have in Digital Measures should be in the new system after the first of the year. So if you log in now and look at the system and you don't see something that's on your account, then it may be that just hasn't mapped over yet, but the good news is is the stuff that's in there will be in the new system. So you don't have to manually put all that information back in, which is that right? Yeah. Okay. I [INAUDIBLE]. All right. Any questions about that? Okay.
And I'll jump right into an overview of the system functionality. And Brendle, please feel free to, to add in anytime. If there's an important point that's key for the school of medicine team. Please feel free to jump in. Yeah. Okay. All right.
So I have a couple versions open on my desktop, but to minimize that confusion here, the production version or the one that we're using currently on campus. I will say the URL for that is in the agenda. And it's efars.provost.vt.edu. That's the version I'll show you today. Again, it's identical to the one you've been using. Just it has… It's the live version for on-campus currently. Okay.
So when you go to login, you'll have to use your two-factor authentication, and so on. It will bring you to this homepage as using some old school web terminology here, our homepage. So every individual faculty member has a presence in Elements. And then we are working to add all the staff as well who would be working to put information in for faculty. Brendle, is there anything you want to add about that or? at the moment, I'm going to say
BRENDLE: we're still working on adding folks to the system. I guess at some point too, You could talk about how people can delegate other folks to their accounts that might be helpful.
[BARBARA]: Sure Okay, I'll do that. Alright, so it is possible to give someone access to your account and have them add information for you. That's done quite a bit here on campus too. In terms of adding scholarship or any, any of the grant information or professional activities.
So, alright, so this is what the interface looks like. It has just a few icons which I'll go over first. And then it's, it's sectioned off into four primary sections. And I'm going to leave records of impact alone because that's not a section that you will need to use but scholarly and creative works. That's all of our research. And then grants. Professional activities would be our service and outreach and then teaching activities over here on this side. Okay. And then it has a little bit of information about the, the user here, which I'll get into here in a minute. And then there's some prompts here that I would recommend overlooking for the time being there. These are messages that are, are suggestions for what you might want to do.
In terms of depositing your scholarly and creative works, I'll show you how to do that when we get into adding scholarship. But One of the things I wanted to bring out first before we get started is that Elements is integrated in with two other systems at the university. I've got, got those mentioned in the agenda, but it's integrated with our open access repository in the library called VTechWorks. And so you may have already shared some of your scholarship in VTechWorks. So it allows you to share, to port over a preprint copy or an acceptable copy in terms of copyright, to VTechWorks from Elements. So if you make a record for it, you can deposit it. And it'll go straight to the library and they'll take care of the cataloging for you.
We have a new open access policy at the university, which you may be aware of. It went into effect July 1st. So faculty are able to share any publications that, any preprint versions of publications, that have been accepted per our new open access policy. It's not mandatory, it's an opportunity.
So the system, you might get the impression from looking at the system that is something you need to do because It's telling me right here, you know, you need to and you have five that are waiting for you to do something. That's a, it's a suggestion. So you don't have to do that if you don't want to or if you can't for, for copyright reasons, but it's an opportunity.
All right, and so I'm going to jump into the icons that I we have over here on the left first. So just like any software system, usually they are more than, there's more than one way to do everything. So I showed you the different sections down here for that house our work. You can get to the same sections from this menu item [HAMBURGER ICON] right here.
You'll see under my work that you can link them here as well. So either way will get you there. I have a few more menu items just because of, of managing the system, but you should all have MY PROFILE and be able to take care of the actions that are here on this listing. So I'll get to editing of our profiles here in just a moment, but so you can edit information about yourself.
Let's look at SET PREFERRED NAME. If I want to change my name just in terms of my given name here, I can do that right away. Update it, and then you can see that it changed it. Over here. Right away. I, a bit of additional information about your name and your rank.
In some cases, if you, it may have incorrect information for you in terms of your salutation or your rank. It. That's in HR. If it is a mistake in either of those items, it would need to be fixed in HR. And I know Brendle may be able to help refer to the person who can do that. It doesn't happen often, but we have run across it sometimes. So anyway, that you can change your name. You're given name here, but in terms of rank and salutation and that's an HR change.
I'm going to go to manage delegates since were right here on this account settings page. So if you want to add other people to help you input any information about yourself. So you can do this. I have our already added Brendle, let's see if I can add Joalenn. I can hey, she'll be surprised. So I’ll add her. And so now when Joalenn logs in she can impersonate me and she can, she can manipulate the information in my records and add to it or change it. In the way that that happens, I'm going to just go straight there because it's handy. See this icon here [ICON WITH TWO PEOPLE AND A PLUS SIGN located in the top bar]. If you hover over it, it says impersonate. So I'm going to click on that. And then now, now I mentioned as a system administrator, I can impersonate just about anybody, but let me see if I can impersonate Dr. Musick. Yes. So I'm going to click on him. So now I can go in on his behalf and add information. And if if you're a delegate, that's all you have to do is you click on that [IMPERSONATE] button and it'll give you a list of who you’re a delegate for. And you just click on your name and it'll take you to their profile. Any questions about that? Okay. I'm going to stop impersonating David for a moment. All right. So that's how you get to impersonate someone. And under account information is how you add delegates or other people.
Okay. Other settings you can manipulate here, automatic claiming, name based search. These are settings here, the first couple of settings help refine the system's ability to find faculty scholarship and the different databases that it searches. One of the nice things about Elements, I believe Digital Measures did this too. But Elements goes out and looks for scholarship out across a set of 10 databases that are common that our work is commonly found in. So and it brings it back to you. If it finds an article or, or publication that has your name on it, it'll bring it back to you and offer you the opportunity to claim it, and then it makes a record for you, which is nice.
So if you click on automatic claiming here, you can look at the different external profiles that you can add. You can add information to help the system find your work. This is particularly helpful if you have a name that's a common name or if it's shared with another scholar, which happens sometimes. This… setting these to be specific to your accounts helps the system parse your information and, and ensure that it's you in terms of your scholarship. So anyway, you can add Dimensions, Web of Science, Scopus, you can see… These are added for me because these systems are at Virginia Tech so I have have accounts here already, but I added my ORCID ID. Many of you probably use ORCID IDs. I added that. So it will go find information in ORCID and bring it back. And my SCOPUS ID. And you can manage each of these. You can to tell it what to do, tell the system what to do with this information. So what shall we do with the ORCID? So I like to have it on auto suggest the items that it brings to me instead of automatically claim them because that way I can see what's coming in and make sure that it's mine. I don't think there are any more Barbara Lockeesin the world. Probably. That's probably a good thing. But anyway, I like to see what what comes in,just to make sure it's accurate. You can remove these accounts and if you want for any reason, if it's incorrect. But anyway, you can, you can check out these settings and you can see when you click the different settings, it tells you down here what it's going to do. So, but anyway, this is the one I recommend.
All right. You can add other email addresses. I have a I have a couple down here that it searches for that might be associated with different articles. Yeah. Any questions about that? Feel free to to speak up. I can see a few people over on the right in my window. But anyway, if you have a question, please feel free to speak up. All right.
Now, let me get back to my menu [HAMBURGER ICON] here. Named based search. Okay? So when you click on name based search, you can look at here's a listing of all the repositories that is searching. You can even have it run a search. But with regards to the name based searching, you can add variants of your name. That might be different across different publications or scholarship. So you can see I've added some different ones here, so I should probably add Barb. So it just adds it. And so now the system will go out and look for that version of my name as well. You can even add different addresses, like if you lived in a different state or a different country and you might have work associated with those different places. You can add that address and it might help refine the search a little bit more. I would suggest not using these [ADDITIONAL SEARCH TERMS] down here. Only if you're looking for something specific that the system, systems aren't finding those in those different repositories. You can add more specific information here. But when you do that, it starts to narrow down the searching instead of looking more broadly, so I would not recommend that one.
Okay, we've looked at account settings already. That's where you manage your delegates. And you can, you can configure your homepage too. You can move things around and delete different different parts in terms of the messages. All right, I'm going to I'm going to…
Let me talk about workspace for a minute FOUND UNDER THE TOOLS HEADING. We'll go to workspace when I show you how to merge records. But when you click on workspace, you can see I brought some different articles and here I'm going to show you how to do that. But this is a place where if you end up with some duplicate articles, which happens sometimes. Maybe you made a manual record for one. And then the system brought one in and they were different enough that it it didn't recognize that they were the same. So you can bring them here and merge them together. I've pulled, happened to pull these out of Google Scholar because, because they are translations of a couple of articles. So anyway, I'm going to clear that for now, but, but when you bring them here, you can join them and then they all become part of one record and then won't show up as separate records in your list. Okay, we'll come back here. Alright. Now I'll come back to importing later [FOUND UNDER TOOLS MENU].
Let me go back to these icons again, this [HOME ICON in the side bar] goes back to your homepage, so you can always go here if you want to start from the beginning.
I'm going to talk about your profile for a moment. [PERSON ICON in the side bar] Okay? So each user has a profile in the system, right? The basics of this information come to us from HR. So it has my name and rank and title and my college and department. And it lists my ORCID number because I've put that in. So some of the information comes in and then some of the information comes from what we add to it as users, right? So you can see over here I've added some other social media, some I have added my Google Scholar profile and Twitter account and the whole deal over there. So you can customize your profile, much like the profiles that you have with Digital Measures. And I'll show you how to do that. It's pretty easy. You can add a bio, a research interests statement. There's some set fields of research that you can choose from to add. And you can add as much or as little other information as you like. And you can also show and hide each aspect of this profile in the public profile system.
So this profile information is now as of a few weeks ago, feeding straight to our public profile system. It's called “Experts at Virginia Tech.” And that's repository of all the faculty profilesthat are at Virginia Tech and it's fed by Elements. Whatever you add into Elements will show up there unless you choose for it not to, okay. So you can manage this information at a, at a pretty granular level, and I'll show you how to do that.
So this is my profile. If I want to edit it, there's a button over here on the right. It says edit profile. And you can see right now my privacy level is public, so it's turned on and we'll go there in just a moment. But let's see. You can, you can see that I can edit different aspects of this work, this information. And I can… My bio information is public, I can edit that just by clicking and manipulating that information. Research interests. It's just a matter of clicking that edit button or Add button. I haven't added anything here. So the system gives you some hints about what, what you might want to do.
Availability is if you're, you're interested in, are available to take on new graduate students, post-docs and that kind of thing. So that's what that means.
So you have some information about your education. You can add here certifications, web address. So here if you're interested in adding social media or any other external websites like I've done in my profile. You just click this, ADD A WEB ADDRESS click that. And then when you click this TYPE drop-down menu, you can see all the different types you can add. Maybe your lab has a web address or your department. But a lot of faculty like to add their Google Scholar profiles and maybe some other social media information. And then you can give it a title. Here. I've already added Twitter, but if I wanted to add it, I will just put label for it and then add the, the hard link to my profile. Okay, so that's where you add those.
The [SCHOLARLY & CREATIVE WORKS] graph is, this is information about what Elements has in the system for you. And then you see down here, it begins to list all the scholarship that is pulling and organizes by year.
So let me show you what that looks like in the public profile. So this is the edit version. I'm going to go over here public profile. Okay. This is what my page looks like in the, in the profile. So it's pulling all of this information from Elements. There's the bio and it has all the links that I added here. And then for the different research listings is pulling all this from Elements and you can organize it by title or date or type of research, but it is alphabetical in terms of type. So books and book chapters, I believe, would be next right on down. So I like to leave it by currency [DESCENDING DATE] there.
And then research is just a statement of research interests.
And then your professional activities. It pulls all your your service and outreach activities from that section. And again, you can organize it by type or date or title.
Teaching it pulls all the information from, from your courses taught here. And we don't send any student information to this expert system, just so you know because you do add your graduate student information into Elements as individual records. But that is not connected to this [Experts] system in any way. I'm all right, but that's what that looks like.
So this is my page and if I go to all profiles, you can see, let's look for Dr. Musick again. Thankfully, he gave me permission to use this his profile and presence in Elements. So you can have have someone else to, to look at two here.
So let's look at Dr. Musick’s profile here. So you can see much like on mine, it has some basic information about about him, his ORCID ID, and then some information about his position and, and education. And then if you click on these [scholarly & creative works, research, professional, and teaching activities] headings right here, it starts to pull his work from Elements. Okay? Alright.
So now the expert system is live and you can, you can search by faculty name or you can search by area of research interest. And this is open to the public. So that's why we wanted to help everybody understand that the information in Elements is defaulted to internal only. So you would have some time to work on it and it wouldn't be public without you knowing about it, right? So currently, all your profiles are set to internal. And then after you've had a chance to work on them, you just click this [PUBLIC] button and make it public. And that way the information will show up in in the Virginia Tech Experts database. Okay. Any questions about that? Okay.
Now, I'm going to show you this report and then suggest that it, it you don't need to worry about it. We're doing our reporting through another system that's connected to Elements also called the University Data Commons. We've shifted away from using Elements for reporting functionality for a couple of different reasons. We're able to customize reports for each college by using the system that we manage that pulls in data from around the university. And I'm going to show you that system toward the end of our session here and show you how to run a report.
But so anyway, you can skip this one, the Academic CV, it's just a generic report. And it's not going to reflect the specific information that we have worked to design the template for over the past couple of years to mimic the one that you've used in Digital Measures
Brendle, do you want to add anything there?
[BRENDLE]: Yeah. So the CV that we're going to be using, the CV report that we're going to be using in Elements looks just like the one from digital measures that has the same formatting.
[BARBARA LOCKEE] And so let me look at the chat here. Yet, yes, you can elect to you elect to make it public. That's right. So I'm going to go back here, your profile. I'm going to go back here. It's set to internal currently. And then to edit it to go public, to make it public you just click Edit Profile and public. So the default is internal and you choose to make it public. So that gives you an opportunity to work on it and flesh it out before it’s made available to the world. Okay.
Let me get to the part about looking at our records and in managing our records. Okay, so as I mentioned, there are a couple of different ways to get to the different sections. So I'm going to show you how to get there from the homepage so you can click on scholarly and creative works. We'll start with scholarship. And you can see that before we go there that the number of items that I've claimed. You can also add new items straight from the homepage. You just click ADD NEW. If you want to VIEW ALL of them. That takes you to a list of all the records. So let's look at all of them right now. Either one of those is the same actually.
So these are all of my records in terms of scholarship, right? So it tells me I've to 279 And it lists them by page. You can choose how many per page. And then you can sort them differently. I like to see the most current ones first, but you can sort them in all these different ways. Okay. And there are different things you can, you can summarize. I like to just see a summary of what's in the record.
Over here on the right [THE FILTERS SECTION]. And this is the same feature across each section, right? An opportunity to search for records or sort them in different ways. So let's say you just wanted to look at all of your books. You just click that type and it brings up all the records that are books. Okay. This is handy if you're if you're looking for something in particular. But if you want to look for a specific item, also, another way you can do it is search for part of the title, let's see I have a title here, so I know that word in the title, so it brings me the records that have that word in the title. Or you can look for relationship, either the author or editor of. So these are just different variables that help you search and find records. And you can clear these and that takes you back to the whole list. Okay? All right. I think, yeah, these are just different, different variables that you can search on as well.
Alright, so let's look at a, at a record. I'm going to look at some scholarship here. How about this one? This one, I want to say you just want to record what's in a record. So you can see this is a title and down here it tells you what type of record, what type of item it is. This is a referee journal article. To actually I need to change that. I want to show you how to edit the type of publication or scholarship, because you might need to do that sometimes. So there's a little pencil here. If you hover over it, it says edit the type. This is actually just a journal article. And so you can see that it changed it right here. It has some other information. It brought in some metrics because of this particular article found by several systems. And I also put it in manually, like different users use the system differently, right? So while some faculty will just use it for Faculty Activity Reporting and at the time that it's needed, some faculty use it just to maintain workflow and, and help keep track of things. I've I've kinda grown to use it that way myself. It took a while to get there, but but anyway, I made a manual record for this when I started the publication and then you can track it through the life cycle. I'll show you what I mean. So I'm clicking on this and you can see that the data sources for this record. This particular one, I created a manual record for. Againwhen I was writing it. And then after I got published, it was found out on the web. So you can see that these different systems shared the article back with me. They were brought in by, by Elements for me and they just stack on top of each other. So the, the important thing to know is that manual records are the ones that will show up in a report. Okay. Manual records have priority in terms of what shows up in a report. So these are not duplicates. They just sit on top of each other and there's some some different information, [inaudible]. But for the manual record. I'm going to say I can edit that. And let's say they had the title wrong. Or I can, I can add to the title here. I can add other authors right here. Let me show you what happens when I do that. I'm going to show you, I'm going to add somebody who's a Virginia Tech faculty member so you can see what happens. When I click to add him. It found him in the system. So and it's asking me, do you want to add this person, is this the right person and I'll say yes. And so now when when Mark Aaron goes into his system, when he logs into Elements, this record will show up for him and he can claim it. So it's a nice feature if you're working collaboratively with other people at Virginia Tech, you might have some records show up and and you think, well, I didn't put that in there, but how did that get in there? Most likely your colleague put it in, which is great.
I always joke around and say that a good strategy is to wait and let, you know, that let your colleagues put it in first. But, but anyway, this is, it is a nice feature for collaborators at, at Virginia Tech. Of course you can add people that are not at Virginia Tech. It just won't find them but you just add their name. And then here's how you'd move author order. These arrows right here. Let’s say that should be first author so I just move him up or move him down so you can just shift author order there. You can add as many authors as you like.
Status. Now status is pretty important because we pull information in the report based on status, right? So this one has been published, but but like I mentioned, I tend to use the system as a repository to track the work through the lifecycle. Not everybody does but. You can track when you're you're working on it, when you've submitted it. And then when you let's say, when you, let's say it got accepted, you can see that this [DATE ACCEPTED] field becomes required. These red asterisks are the fields that are required in a record. So you can see that there aren't many that are required. And it looks like there are a lot of fields here. You don't actually have to populate those yourself. But the only ones that you do need to populate are the ones with the red asterisk. Right? So then you can see when I when I indicate that the article has been published, then makes the publication date required. So that report can pull on that as well.
Now published online. This status, I'm sure you're probably familiar with this in the use of preprints and many journals will try to get information out, to get, try to get publications out more quickly prior to a print version. So they'll publish the version online. And that's what that means. Okay, published online. We're pulling both of these into the published category. So I would just suggest choosing published if an article has been published, no matter if it's online or in print. Because many journals are shifting to online publication only there's some room for confusion there in terms of categorizing it. But in the report we pull both published online and published into the published category.
Publication date, journal name, all that. So again, you can see there's, there are a lot of fields here, but they're not required. Only the ones with the red asterisk. So that's how you edit an existing record. And I mentioned I edited that manual record.
It is not possible to edit other kinds of records that are brought in for you because they come from another source, right? So they're locked down. But let's say I didn't have a manual record and I just waited for it to be published and it came in from Crossref and it found it. And there was something wrong with it. Let's say the title wasn't right. While I can't change this record, you can always create a manual record. Okay. That's always an option. So let’s see if I can find one.
I'm going to go back here to scholarly and creative works. And see. Let me search for one here. Okay. I've got a manual record here. In the case where there is again in the case where it's brought in from an external database like, like one of these scopus, or crossref or Dimensions, and there's not a manual record. You will have a button here that says create manual record. And it replicates all the information in the record that was brought in that you're copying. It’s basically making a copy of it. And then you can just change the part that's wrong and save it. And then that becomes the record that shows up in the report because of the priority for manual records. Okay. Any questions about that? That's the way to correct a record. If it comes in from an external source and it's not correct. Right? It's pretty straightforward. Okay?
So let's see, let me go back here [TO SCHOLARLY AND CREATIVE WORKS]. I wanto to show you too, up here at the top. You can see these menu items claimed, pending and rejected. So if, if the system found some articles that look like they might be mine, it would bring them back to me and indicate to me here with a number how many are review. So let's say there was one there. I click PENDING. It would show me here what the article is and give me an opportunity to claim it.
You can see that I've rejected several here [IN THE REJECTED PANEL]. Most of them are just test items, but let's see if there's anything. Okay. Let's see, I will claim this one looks like a real thing, so claim it, and then it will show up in my list. Okay? Alright. So anyway, if you do have articles waiting for you to review, this is your cue to go look at them and in either claim them or reject them. All right.
I want to show you also in the summary information about a record, something you might find interesting too. Let’s look at journal articles. All right. I am going to find one that has some metrics for you to see. Okay. You, again, I'm going to look at this one.
So this article, you can see this one's a manual record that's showing up, but it's got some metrics. The metrics are a reflection of, of metrics that are found from the different databases that are populating this particular record. So if I click on metrics, you can see that it gives me some information about how the article has been cited in different ways. So Scopus found some citations. Web of Science, Altmetric. This is information about alternative metrics like Twitter and Mandalay, different news outlets in that kind of thing. So if you can dig into that, I won't do that here, but that's what metrics are in and these metrics are dynamically updated, so they'll continue to be refreshed as the database, as the databases are searched for information about your records, you'll see these these metrics change as your publications are cited. All right.
Now, I'm going to show you how to add a record. So again, you can add a new record here. Or if you're in the list, I want to show you how to do it if you're in the list of records. So here all the records of scholarship. In every different section of elements, you have this big plus icon over on the right hand side. And when you click it, it brings up a menu for you to choose from what type of activity you want to add. So let's say I want to add a new book. And this brings us to a page where it tries to help me remember if I've started a record for this particular item already. You can type in part of the title and it'll see if it's there. And it'll bring up for you and videos. And if not, it'll just take you here. So let's say I'm the author of a book. And this is my test book. And then you indicate what type it is. It's a scholarly book and it's submitted. And let me say it's published so you can see that. Then I'm going to add my publication date. Let's say it was published on November the 1st. Okay. So when you add that date, the publication date, this becomes an important reference point for the report. The reports again, they are based on a publication date range, right, that you give the system. And then organized by the type of activity under research, teaching, grants, and and outreach and service. So and then and then the status of those items. Right. So that's why dates are are pretty important parts out of a record. Again, here's an opportunity to add a coauthor, a URL. Any other information about the book I can add here. And then I can I'm not going to save this particular record, but then you save it after you finish populating it. Okay?
And so adding a new record is the same across the whole system, right? You can always click this Plus icon, and it'll bring you the list of different types of activities in that section. So right now we're in the scholarly and creative work section. So you can see there are many, many different types to choose from. Clinical guidelines we added for the med school. Okay. as a specific type. Let's see what's in here. Okay? Right.
So you can see that the status is required there, but the medium, if it might be different than a print publication, you can add that. That's clinical guidelines. Any questions about adding scholarship? Brendle, anything else you want to add on that section that I haven't hit?
[BRENDLE]: No, I think you covered it pretty well.
[BARBARA]: Okay. All right. Well, let's jump over to grants. So grants, grant information, for the most part, for you all, will need to be entered manually. You can see that grants, if I click to add one, there are different types of grant activities that you can add. You can add proposal information. Externally funded grants, internally funded grants, and then non-sponsored research is another type that we just added. So we've differentiated proposals from, from funded grants because quite often the information is different, right? So a proposal has, it has the same categories. But sometimes the amounts might be different or the PIs might be different. There might be something different about it at the point in which it's funded. So the key information here would be your relationships and whether or not you're the PI, co-PI, consultant. You can add that, the title. You can add an abstract if you like. Collaborators go here and the same is true for Virginia Tech collaborators as for scholarship, the status is required. So you indicate that there when you submitted it and the amount, that kind of thing. So that's proposal information.
I wanted to say that if you're if you're a collaborator with a Virginia Tech faculty member and the grant runs through Virginia Tech's sponsor programs office, then your grants that the grant information will be automatically fed to Elements for you. You can see in my situation, these are records that come in from Sponsored Programs for me. So we bring in externally funded grants from OSP, but just the ones that had been funded. But that's only if it goes through the Virginia Tech Sponsored Programs Office. And I think that's something that we'll continue to work on going forward to try to integrate that with the med school’s OSP. So but for now, grants, unless it's a Virginia Tech OSP managed grant, they're added manually.
Let's look at non-sponsored research. This is an opportunity to represent maybe a pilot project or some sort of project that's in a preliminary stage that you're working on that hasn't been funded yet. So Brendle, Yeah. Is there any other information about this particular kind of activity that's important?
[BRENDLE]: I just was going to say anything that's, let's see, affiliated with like a Carilion Clinic grant or any kind of external grant, obviously, as Barb said, you'd have to add that manually because it won’t feed in.
[BARBARA] Right. Okay. So that's grantsnd then professional activities. That's our service and outreach, right. So that's a general category that houses both. So you'll see when you go to this section and you go to add a new one. There are many, many types that you can choose from. So if you're a member in a professional association, if you're an editor, a curator, most of us review manuscripts, I think of some sort. Let me check that one you can see what that looks like. So if you're a manuscript reviewer, you can see that you can add the title of the journal or the conference or whatever you're reviewing for here, the type of publication or activity, maybe it's a conference proposal and then the start date that you begin reviewing. Now this is important too, to keep in mind whenever you don't put an end date, this activity will continue showing up on your report going forward. So maybe you were a, you are a reviewer for a journal and you have been for a while and say, I'm going to say I started reviewing last year for this particular journal. So this will show up on my report until I go in and put an end date. Let's say, you know, next year. I won't do it now. But, but anyway, when I stop reviewing for that particular journal, I need to go in here and put an end date so it'll stop showing up on the report outside of that date range. But this is a common, sort of a common troubleshooting issue.
Sometimes when items show up on your report and you're not expecting them to, that's the first thing I suggest checking is the date because it might be that there needs to be an end date put in or there's something about the date that's that's off-kilter. That needs to be needs to be changed to to have it within the date range of the report. Anyway, that's the first thing I would check if there's something there on the report that shouldn't be or if there's an item missing and you know, you made a record for it. If you go to the record, this is the first thing I would check would be the date. So for for journal reviewing, again, I would indicate and leave it open until you no longer review for that journal. I don't believe… We don't collect the number of works reviewed, so that's not required in your report. And you can put a URL if you want. But that's all there is to adding a journal.
Let's see, there are many types of activities. If you held an office, you can see what that record looks like here. Okay. See what other activities licensure. This is pretty important, I think, for the School of Medicine. And if you have a certain type of licensure, you have to indicate the date you obtained it, and then you can not indicate this until it's expired. But this would be important information as well. In the scope of licensure here. Right?
Any awards you get, you can indicate those here. Any type of award and I'll show you what I mean and you can label them. You put the distinction name here, and then the purpose of the award you would indicate here. And then it would fall into the right section in the report. Maybe it's a teaching award or a research award. But anyway, so this is a required field for, for us to know what kind of an award it was when you got it. And then what the scope of it was, that's required. And then this other information is optional. But you can indicate the, the geographic scope and where, who gave it and that kind of thing.
Let's see what else. If you review grant proposals, many of us do that. P and T [promotions and tenure] assessments. If you do that, for another university, you can indicate that here. And consulting. There's what that record looks like. Anyway, you can see the process is generally the same, and there are many different types of service and outreach activities that you can choose from here. Any questions about that service and outreach.
Okay, and again, you can see over here on the right that you can filter those just like you can filter publications. Let's say you want to see if you've added a particular committee, if you have a lot of records and sometimes it's hard to see, you know, to look through all of them. The quick way to do that is to just go to that particular type. Let's say I want to know if I've added P&T for this year and I did. And so in the format of the record, summaries are the same. You can see that the type of activities here, and I can change that just like with the publication. It gives me an opportunity to pick a different type. Here. It gives me start dates and end dates. Yeah. All right.
Let me show you another handy feature that's available across all the different activity types too, before I go on to teaching. So let's say I want to update my own CV, my personal CV. Or, or let's say someone sent me an email asking for recent activity that they want to put in a newsletter. And I know that I've put it into Elements already and I don't want to type it again. So it's really nice to be able to do that if you know it's in Elements, you can come here and get it and export it and into any number of formats, which is great. So let's say I want to share this information. And I could click several actually within a particular section. And then click Export and pick what type of file. And let's say I want a Word file, so it gives me the information that's in that record. And I can pop it in an e-mail. I'm going to show you what that looks like in for scholarship, as that's probably something asked for frequently.
Let’s go to scholarship. This is a pretty handy feature I have found to be able to export this information in different ways. So I don't wanna choose all of them, but let's just choose a couple. I'm going to export those into a Word file. So it creates this Word file. And I can copy those and it's in APA format. And then include it in my CV or an email or whatever, whatever I need to do with it. So exporting might be a handy function for you. Any questions about that?
All right, I'm going to jump to teaching and just like in Digital Measures teaching activities are brought in for you that with the courses that you teach, we've developed a system in conjunction with the school of medicine team to, to, to get your teaching into the system. And it'll hit, there'll be a lag just like with DigitalMeasures, but it will be brought in for you. And Brendle, do you want to say anything about that in terms of when that usually happens?
[BRENDLE]: Yeah. So generally the way it works is the domain managers send that information to me shortly after the courses have been completed and then we import it into the system and upload it for you guys. So that information is going to be uploaded and imported in the same fashion.
[BARBARA]: That's great. Okay, thank you. Alright. Well, and then other teaching activities that aren't imported for you include supervision. Students, particularly. I used the grad student supervision quite a bit and I imagine that you all might as well, but let me show you what that looks like. So other teaching activities need to be manually entered. So let's say I have a new doctoral student. I'm going to add that person here. And I am their advisor. You can see the different roles that you can add along with that particular student. And then if you have any co supervisors, so you can add them here. Again, that will show up if they're a Virginia Tech employee. And you add them here, it'll show up for them too, which is great. And then you identify their degree. And this other information is optional, but if you want to indicate their subject, their status, I'm going to say they're in progress. If they a thesis title you want to add, you can do that. And then start date is required. So let's say the students started in August and they'll keep showing up on my report until I put an end date here, right. Until I mark them as completed, would say that they'll graduate next month. So I'll put an end date so that that will stop them from showing up on reports outside of this of this year's date range, right? Whenever I put the end date for this year. But they will like, uh, like committee service and other continuous activities. They will keep showing up on your report until you put an end date there. So if it's… It's helpful if it should be if they should show up on your report. Right. But but if if they if they're showing up there and you're thinking they shouldn't, that's the first place I would check is to come back to the record for that student and see about the end date. So you can add some other information here too about the student if you want. Okay?
Other types of teaching activities you might be interested in adding. Maybe you developed a new course or new curriculum. You can add those here. If you supervise a post-doc graduate medical education, you can add that here. Brendle do you want to say anything about that particular activity?
[BRENDLE]: Yeah. So we I don't think we have a whole lot of folks that do that. I mean, we do have some folks that do that. And again, that's stuff that they would have to add because we don't get that information and import it. I know we have some people that do stuff with VCOM and some of the other students outside of our one through four students.
[BARBARA] Okay. And that that reminds me of an item under I believe it's under professional activities like research here. Let's see continuing… Let’s see, the CME information. Brendle, can you remind me where that shows up for our School of Medicine faculty continuing medical education. That's I know that's brought in.
[BRENDLE]: I believe we are putting that under professional development. So right now the CME activity and professional development, if it's something that's been through Carilion’s OCPD office or TEACH, then it gets sent to us and we import that information, which we're going to continue to do in Elements. If it's something again, if it's something that's been done inside of that, you attended our professional development thing at a conference in Las Vegas or you attended some other kind of CME thing, then you input that information. You would have to manually add.
[BARBARA]: Okay. Thank you. I'm going to look at the chat here to make sure. Let's see. Under under graduate medical education would we include clinical supervision of residents? Brendle, do know that one? Clinical supervision is that I'm going to go back to teaching.
[BRENDLE]: I’ll have to double-check on that one
[BARBARA]: graduate student, student supervision, I'm going to supervise teaching activity. So here's a potential one, but yeah, let's we can follow up on that one. Thank you. Good question.
All right. Okay. So I've hit the highlights on how to look at records and edit records. I'm going to show you how to merge records first of all, before we move on to reporting too, because that's that's one function I haven't shared with you. And that can it can happen where you have duplicate records. Like I mentioned towards the beginning. Especially if you use Elements to track your, your publications or your scholarship through the lifecycle. Let's say you make a record when you are working on an article and you submit it and you use Elements to keep track of it. And then later it's published. And then another record comes in that the system finds where it's published. This happens pretty frequently for me anyway, just because that's how I use the system. But if elements recognizes that my manual record, if they are identical, then they just stack on top of each other. Right? So like I showed you one that was… Well, let’s see, let me, let me go to journal articles right now. Can find one here in the list. This one. So you can see that there are different data sources for this one. And so when Crossref found it and brought it to me, it recognized that I already had a manual record. So it didn't create a separate one. It recognized them as identical. But sometimes that doesn't happen. Or there might be a mistake like I mentioned, there could be a mistake with that, which you can fix by adding a manual record. But let's say there are two records that you want to merge together. If you want to keep the manual record. Let's say one is manual and one comes from another data source and they're slightly different, but it's really the same item. There. You can… One option is to just get rid of one of them, right? So you can delete one. And the way that you delete a record, as you click these three dots right here, and you get the option reject. Let's just say there are two of these particular conference papers, right? I can click reject and say I don't want this record to show up in my stack anymore. So that's one way to get rid of duplicates. A reason to merge themif you want to keep both of them. Let's say you have a manual record and you're happy with it. Then another one comes in on top of it, or another one comes in that slightly different, That's, that's from the, let's say Scopus or Saibow. It might have some metrics in it that I want to keep track of and refer back to later or like how many times it has been cited in different databases. So that would be a reason to keep it, one from an external source because it has that extra information in it. So you can merge them together. So I'll show you how to do that. I had a couple in there to begin with when we started, but let's say these two things, even though they're not identical, I'm going to pretend like they are. I'm going to click them. I'm going to click the duplicate records and then go back to the three dots over here. And add them to my workspace. Okay? And then I'm going to go to my workspace. Up here at the [HAMBURGER] menu in the upper left-hand corner. I go to tools and workspace. Let’s see. I'm sorry, I thought added both of them. Let me go back here and get the other one. And I didn't do that. I'm going to add it to the workspace. Okay? So now I'll go back there. And it gives me both of these items and let's say they're identical, but they're just, you know, one is maybe a translation. That's another common thing that I see is a translated article. That's the same thing, but I want to stack and on top of one that I already have. So all I do is click Join and it stacks them on top of each other and they won't show up as duplicates anymore. Okay? And so after I do that, I'm going to clear the workspace. Okay. And then when you get back to your records, they'll show up as one item instead of two.
All right. Let's see if there's anything else I wanted to show you here. Privacy settings that's handy to know both for your profile and also for records. If there are records that you don't want to show up and out on your profile. One way to manage that is also here. You can click the privacy settings. And you can either indicate that this only people inside the university can see it or that it's completely private and it won't show up. It'll still show up in your report. So we made it that way because we wanted you to be able to have some control over over who could see it, but it's still show up in a report because you probably need for it to show up in your CV that your department chair might need to see or other administrators. So anyway, that's how you control the privacy of individual items. And so you have the opportunity to do that here with individual records in the system and also on your profile. At each level where I showed you can edit the privacy of each aspect of your profile. You can do that in the profile section right here. When you click Edit Profile, you can click that. Let's say I want to make my bio private. I can, so I can manage the privacy here.
And also, I mentioned that student information is not sent to Virginia Tech Experts just in terms I'm thinking in terms of what's private and what's not shared with others outside of you and Administrators with whom you would work. So for the Virginia Tech Expert system, we don't send student information and we also don't send any information about P and T [promotion and tenure] reviews. Let's say these are activities that, that many, many faculty engage and for other universities that shouldn’t show up anywhere, right? So that information is not shared on Virginia Tech Experts. All right. But that's a little bit about privacy and how you manage it at the record level. Any questions? So far?
All right. Well, I'm going to move on to reporting then I think I'm I've hit all the highlights about how to look at your records and edit them and add new ones. And so now we're gonna talk a little bit about reporting. So I mentioned at the beginning of this session that we have moved away from using the Elements system for reports to using a system that the university has created and manages. So we can take advantage of different sources of data streams coming into a centralized repository and use it for different kinds of reports. It allows us to make customized reports for, for each college, which is pretty handy. So as I mentioned earlier, we've recreated the report that the CV template that you've used in Digital Measures before. And that will become, that's being pilot tested right now. So it's not currently available yet, but it will be available for your use again, right when we come back from the holidays and early January. But that's, that's under testing at the moment. Alright, but I'm going to show you generally how to run a report in the university data commons and where your report will show up. And then Brendle, you can add anything else I might have left out that would be helpful. That sound okay.
All right, that the university data commons. I'm just going to open a new browser and show you this. It's a separate system, right? So University Data Commons is a place where different data streams come together that we can use for different purposes, like resource allocation, enrollment management, strategic planning, these two down here are open access and anybody can see those if you go to this URL,udc.vt.edu, this is the, the home of these different apps that leverage these different data streams from around the university. So we've shifted to using the UDC for the generation of your report, the academic CV report through this app called Faculty Activity. I'm going to show you an easier way to get there. But anyway, just so you know what it looks like in the separate system in case you ever encounter this. This is the, what the description of the system is. So you can run a report. Every faculty member has access to the to the faculty activity reports. So and then administrators have access to run group reports depending upon the group that you're connected to right, so that the administrator privileges are tied to your, your access in Elements, right? So if you’re setup data at a higher level, at a role that's an administrative role in Elements that carries over to the data commons. So let's say you're a you're a department head. You would be able to run a group report for everybody that's in your department. But faculty can only run individual reports for themselves, for ourselves.
So I'll show you, I'm going to run a report for myself. And this is what the interface looks like. It's pretty simple. You pick your college, so you'll pick the School of Medicine. And your report. Right now we only have generic reports available here. These reports are available for everyone in the university as well, but it's just I'm going to run just a general summary of activities. When your report is live for the School of Medicine in early January, it'll show up here. It'll it'll say VTC, SOM, report. CV probably. And so then the name of it will be available here as a link. So I'm going to pick for right now, just to demo, the activity summary report. This summary is based on the university's promotion and tenure dossier template, which we also have developed as well. So your name is populated here and then you just indicate the dates for the report. So I'm going to I'm going to run it for last year. We run ours on the calendar year through December, download the report and so this is like what the generic summary report looks like. It pulls in my information and the date range and it goes and gets my my teaching scores for me. Because those are not in Elements. It pulls in the teaching information that's populated in Elements. So I didn't have time to do that, which is great. It lists the doc students and their terms that line up with the reporting dates.
So again, this is just a general listing of the information that I have put in Elements that falls under these categories. In this particular report, it pulls scholarship under the type of scholarship it is and the status of it. So you can say that these are published and these are accepted. So status is a field that it will use as an organizer as well. Again, this is just to narrow down, but you can go run one of these. But for now the information for you hasn't been fully ported over yet. So don't be alarmed. If you do run one and it's not complete. It's just that the information is probably not there yet, but it will be. So anyway, this is just a demo of how the system works for when you're ready to run your CV. Or someone would run a CV for you. It pulls the information from Elements and generates a report for you. And that's all there is to it. But I wanted to show you, you don't have to go outside the system to another browser window and get there to the UDC. In Elements, you can run a report. If you click the Help button. It takes you to the well, it takes you to the help page, which has some other resources on it too but to generate a faculty activity report you can go here and it links to that system so you don't have to remember the URL. You can always get to it from the help page, okay? And here we are. Again at the UDC. And we got there just by clicking Help. Okay.
It's a little bit quirky because it's not part of the Elements system, right? It's pulling information from Elements but we did want to have a way to take you to it without going outside. You can always go to udc.vt.edu, University Data Commons and run a report. But if you're in Elements and you want to go there straight away than this is how you would get there. Okay. And you have some other information here too? I know I know Brendle and her folks there and her team in the School of Medicine are have been helpful and will continue to be great resources in terms of our implementation.
You can also send questions to efarshelp@.vt.edu if you run into a snag. All of us on the implementation team answer this email. So whoever gets to it first will help you out, usually pretty quickly. So anyway, hopefully those are some good resources there for you. Okay. I think that’s it, Brendle. Have I left anything out?
[BRENDLE]: No, I think you did a pretty good job. The only other thing I would add about the report is that the CV report obviously will be in that same area for the UDC. And then we also have a lot of or we have several pre preloaded reports that we’re already using in Digital Measures for other things. Not everybody is using those, but some folks are. Those reports are being mapped over into Elements or into the UDC as well. So if you're somebody that contacts me on a pretty regular basis for a specific report. I can work with you on how to get that out of the UDC. And then if you're somebody who needs like an ad hoc report, we can work with you guys on that as well. Because I do occasionally have folks who askHey, I need a report for some specific thing that they're working on, whether it's scholarly activity or some other field in the system. So And I think that Dr. Pauly had asked a question. Let me see what she said in the chat. Yes. So we have you can get to that through our… Vianne’s got got a page setup. I'm the VTCSOM page I can send you that information. If you go to the VTCSOM website and you just type in the search bar Elements. There's a page that comes up that says transition to elements. And you can click on the links there to get to your Elements account. And I can also drop that in the chat for you guys as well. And another thing to note is you won’t be able to access the Elements, unless you have your PID set up. So if you guys don't have your PID set up, you won't be able to see anything. So you just want to make sure that you have that set up. I know some folks have had a little bit of trouble with that. So if you try to get into the system and for some reason you can't, just let me know and I can see if it's a PID issue or if it's some other issue.
[BARBARA]: Good. Thanks, Brendle. All right. Well, that's our overview for you. So we'll open it up and see if there any other questions. Okay. All right.