- Written by Will Snow
Visible Legacy progress at year-end 2017
Thank you to all our users and stakeholders for your help this year. I want to give you a status update on Visible Legacy as we conclude the 2017 year.
The University Sponsored-Research Ecosystem
We are excited about being part of the academic sponsored-research ecosystem. The philanthropy of Foundation funding shines through university research and illuminates paths to solutions for the world’s problems. The impact of Foundation funding is seen in papers, projects, inventions, new professors and new companies. We are pleased to have growing success in communicating the outputs of university research to industry “Tech Scouts” who can translate academic innovations into real-world applications.
Visible Legacy year-end 2017
We have mapped more depth of Stanford University research. All faculty Profiles have been mapped and we've added NIH grants. We are working with University groups to link faculty Profiles and OTL disclosures to our Navigator maps which in turn link back to Lab and invention pages as well as papers, projects, patents, news and collaborators. This helps Tech Scouts find a fit faster.
We have mapped all of Duke University Faculty Profiles and their OLV disclosures. We mapped Duke in a matter of weeks proving to ourselves we can scale quickly to handle more institutions.
We are now working toward mapping the top 25 research universities, which is the most-asked feature requested by our Tech Scout users. We will be correlating VIVO profiles and NIH grants and other public grant databases to disambiguate topics and keep high data quality.
We have moved our Navigator servers to the Amazon AWS cloud and re-factored the maps to improve speed, keywords and search capabilities. Our web traffic is growing, now 200 page views and 60 visitors per day.
We have been featured in "Industry-Sponsored Research Management" as a tool for University Licensing Office communication. We have improved our free widgets and added the capability for buttons and links to enhance the stickiness and navigation of Technology Licensing pages.
We have mapped the investigators that are funded by Packard Foundation and HHMI giving us featured research at a large number of institutions. We mapped the Fitzpatrick Institute as an example of Foundation sponsored research. We will map the NIH Brain Initiative as an example of many-institution multi-disciplinary impact.
We recently posted a position paper about using visual content to enhance communicating Foundation impact and we are beginning to quantitatively measure impact along the lines of Duke’s Coulter program. We have a recent blog post on this with a short video showing what we are doing now. The video is a good overview if you are not familiar with Visible Legacy Navigator so I've copied it in "Media" below.
It has been a productive year for the Visible Legacy team. Thank you for your support.
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