The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a $49,950 grant to FSU iSchool’s Dr. Besiki Stvilia for a collaborative planning project with Queens College in New York City. Stvilia partnered with Dong Joon Lee and Shuheng Wu, graduates of the iSchool’s doctoral program.

IMLS’s priority is to create a national digital platform, which will likely include research-based knowledge, and the group’s proposal addresses researcher participation in research identity management systems.

Stvilia’s interest in the subject stems from 2009 research examining project team diversity and team productivity. A central problem in that project was the inability of traditional systems to accurately portray connections between names and identities. “I thought it would be interesting to study what motivates or alternatively discourages researchers to share and upkeep their research identity information,” Stvilia said.

Both Dong Joon Lee and Shuheng Wu share connections to the iSchool and Stvilia through doctoral classes. They came to the project through previous collaborations and a shared interest in scientific data and information curation.

The second phase of this planning project will include the creation of a best practices guide for creating and maintaining online research identity data curation communities, and will translate the project plan into design claims. “The goal is to use this research to design and test a set of mechanisms to motivate researchers to share their research identity information,” Stvilia said.

The IMLS 2016 grant has been awarded to other top research universities, such as Harvard College, University of Texas at Austin, and Rutgers University.