2018 Charleston Library Conference

We are lost in a blizzard of data. As platforms and organizations track us without our informed consent, we struggle to hold on to our privacy and present our work in context. Because scholarship is collaborative and interdisciplinary, we often struggle to receive credit for our contributions, which often take forms other than a single unitary work done at a single institution. Because academic work is precarious, scholars move from graduate school to a postdoc program, to diverse jobs within and adjacent to the academy.

We need tools that can help individual scholars take control of their identity so they can do great work and frame their own narrative even as they move across spaces and disciplines. At the same time, institutions need tools that can tell their stories and capture the value they provide even if researchers are only in-house for limited times or in changing roles. The tools they need are persistent identifiers like ORCID that provide a consistent, disambiguated identity. This session introduces those tools and describes how they empower researchers, libraries, and academic institutions to control their own identity and tell the stories of their work.

Participants in this session will hear perspectives on both individual and institutional identifiers from librarians at NCSU Libraries and representatives from ORCID (individual) and Ringgold (institutional). In additional to a general overview of both ORCID and Ringgold, participants will also learn about up and coming areas of development and use cases. Participants will also learn about the ways in which the NCSU Libraries is using ORCID to support scholars and describe the work done across campus. There will also be a few preselected questions that the panelists will answer as well time for the audience to ask questions.