Elements at Virginia Tech: Review Imported Information

Virginia Tech uses an activities data system to collect and manage information about research and scholarship, creative works, teaching, extension, outreach, and service activities.

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Elements Workshop Slides

Elements Workshop Slides
Information on reviewing pre-existing information starts on slide 10

Review Imported Information in Elements

Elements imports information from a number of systems and databases, some of which cannot be deleted, such as grant data from the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP). It is important that you review the information for accuracy and request changes from the correct individual to make changes, such as changes to your prefix or rank, which can only be made by your department Banner representative.

Courses ►
  • Courses taught at Virginia Tech
    • Automatically added from Banner at the end of each semester
      • Any corrections to this data must be done in Banner - contact your department Banner representative
  • Other teaching activities, such as invited lectures and courses taught as adjuncts at other universities
    • Need to be added manually

Grants ►

Information about grants is fed into the system from the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) monthly. Note: If a grant or contract appears in your profile with "No data provided", that means that the funder has restricted publicity about that project.

If you want to correct the underlying grant data imported from the OSP, you will need to contact OSP directly to make the changes.

Although it is possible to add a manual record, the record source from OSP will take precedence over any manual record so that will not correct information in reports and is likely to generate confusing duplicates.

OSP sends data to Elements approximately monthly. If necessary (due to deadlines) you can manually add a footnote to a downloaded report (i.e. your FAR) after downloading it from the University Data Commons (UDC).  To ensure that information is accurate in the future, you should also contact OSP or Banner to correct the data there.

Here's an overview of how grant data flows between systems at Virginia Tech.

Grant Data Flow at Virginia Tech

Preferred Name & Pronouns ►

If you use a different name for your scholarly work than the name that appears in Banner, you can indicate a Preferred Name and Pronouns.

  • Go to Menu > Set Preferred Name (Under 'About Me')
  • Scroll to Preferred Name and Pronouns and edit.
  • Select 'Update Preferred Name' to save the changes.

Prefix & Rank ►

The prefix field (Mr/Ms/Dr) and the rank field (position, e.g., 'Assistant Professor') are populated by Banner. 

Your department Banner representative can change your prefix and rank field. You can let them know the names of the fields and where they are imported:

  • For the prefix, the field is called spbpers_name_prefix on the screen PPAIDEN.
  • The field data is imported from the Banner university functional title field, found on the PWADREM and the PWAVTTL form in Banner.

Once the information is updated in Banner, the update should appear in Elements by the next business day.

Tags: eFARS