LITS Annual Report: New Opportunities
Today's academic environment requires modern techniques for advancing scholarship in ways that capture the imagination. Leveraging the core strengths of LITS created new opportunities for growth and development in FY16.
Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP) Upgrades
The focus for FY16 has been to complete a major upgrade to PeopleSoft Financials 9.2 (“Compass”). To continue to maximize ERP investment, the university realized new value from the current versions of the application as well as continuing to receive vendor support. While taking advantage of new and improved functionality, this new version provides more intuitive user interactions and expanded functionality to better support business needs. One specific example is leveraging the more consistent, unified workflow model for transactions and eliminating the cost of third-party licenses used by the previous version of Compass.
Business Intelligence
While continuing to support Emory Business Intelligence (EBI) Finance, the primary focus for FY16 was the implementation of student data. With participation from the Office of the Registrar and Institutional Research, the project delivered a limited release of dashboards for Student Profile, Degree, Enrollment and Graduation/Retention statistics. While the project team delivers the remaining dashboards for Admissions and Financial Aid, Institutional Research will work with units and schools to finalize data definitions at the institutional level before wide-release of delivered dashboards.
Southern Spaces Redesign
Southern Spaces, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal published in collaboration with the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University, launched a new design in FY16 to emphasize visual clarity, readability, richer multimedia, and a mobile-friendly responsive layout. The new site also introduced a dynamic, open source journal publishing platform. The new design demonstrated a commitment to sharing the tools used by ECDS to help make multimedia scholarship possible for a wider range of authors and audiences. One of the first collaborations with the new design involved a lecture series called “MAP IT: Little Dots, Big Ideas,” in which Southern Spaces featured the digital spatial project that mapped the humanities and public health in the U.S. South and Global South.
ECDS Internship Program
The Digital Scholarship Internship Program is the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship’s graduate student training and professional development program. The 2015–2016 academic year was the pilot year for the program, and the team successfully implemented project and time management tools for all 25+ members of the internship program to better help the center understand how it manages projects, student time, FTE time, and yearly financial budgets.
The Digital Scholarship Internship Program presents a unique opportunity for graduate students to learn digital scholarship skills, tools, and methods relating to research and pedagogy. The training and professional development were designed to prepare all ECDS graduate students to be successful in careers within, alongside, and beyond the academy. As paid graduate employees, students work 10 hours per week in the Center and work on dissertation research when not training, assisting faculty and staff, or working on ECDS projects.
Building Patient Engagement
EHC-IS concentrated on building greater patient and family engagement through the Patient Portal. The Patient Portal is a tool that enables our patients to communicate with their health care teams electronically, review their medication lists and request prescription refills, and see their laboratory results. Currently 42% of EHC patients are enrolled in the portal, and EHC-IS will continue to work all of our ambulatory sites and hospitals to further increase enrollment. During FY 15-16, EHC-IS expanded the content on the portal so that patients can also now review their radiology results.
Rose Library Enhanced Operations
With the renovation complete, the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library enhanced operations in FY16, taking a best practices approach to all aspects of the library. From the acquisition process to relationships with vendors and donors, the area of financial operations was a focus of the management team. Additionally, patron research services were improved through new procedural controls, yielding better access and use of the reading room, advanced registration and availability of materials. The Rose Library also partnered with Campus and Community Relations to enhance marketing and communications of events and exhibits.
Contributions to QEP
All colleges accredited by the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges are required to develop and implement a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) as part of their reaffirmation process. Emory’s QEP is titled "The Nature of Evidence: How Do You Know" and Emory Libraries made several contributions to this plan in FY16. Academic Technology Services (ATS) shot and edited a series of videos with QEP faculty illustrating examples of evidence-based study in their areas of discipline. Emory Libraries also hosted a faculty development workshop during the summer of 2016 in which faculty honed their courses to be evidence-focused. The purpose of this work was to lay a groundwork for first-year students to understand how important evidence is in their college education.
Bold Exhibitions
Among the full slate of exhibitions in FY16 were a pair of groundbreaking exhibits that opened toward the end of the year and will run into FY17: First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare and Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch. The First Folio is a national traveling exhibit that brings to Emory a nearly 400-year-old original folio of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, As You Like It, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra. Emory is honored to be able to exhibit the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios along with this First Folio, as a showcase to Emory’s commitment to understanding the human condition. The Billops Hatch exhibit is a comprehensive collection of the art and activism of these two leading stewards of African-American history. The exhibition reflects on the couple’s commitment to speaking truth about power and exploring the meaning and purpose of African-American art.
Healthy Aging and Neurology
In response to a significant investment from the Goizueta Foundation, the Department of Neurology had a very aggressive timeframe that involved the orchestration of multiple integrated projects, including the establishment of seven new REDCap projects, the implementation of Emory Research Subject Registry (ERSR) and Salesforce portal, the integration between the two aforementioned systems as well as the integration between ERSR, REDCap and Nautilus LIMS. The project team also migrated 24,000 individual records and related records from SugarCRM (Neurology’s old CRMS) and Lava (Neurology’s old Subject Registry), to ERSR and REDCap.
"For more than 50 years, Camille Billops and James Hatch have been stewards of African American history and memory. This exhibition accounts for their tremendous efforts to preserve materials related to the development of the arts as a form of expression, and as a medium for speaking truth to power for African Americans."
Pellom McDaniels II, PhD
Faculty Curator
Rose Library