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Virginia Tech Experts is a searchable online profile system providing a public facing view of researchers, scholars, educators at Virginia Tech, along with their publications, research interests, teaching, and additional activities.
Virginia Tech Experts supports identifying potential collaborators and discovery of research, scholarship, creative works, and areas of specialization and expertise across disciplines. It can be searched by name or keyword, and search results can be filtered by department/unit, subject tag, and availability.
You can now easily set up an individual Experts public profile. This is done using the Elements database system and involves a few simple steps.
Preferably, you should complete the profile information on Elements, such as your bio and academic positions, before making your profile public (Step 1 below).
Here is an example of a complete Experts profile.
When you make your Virginia Tech Experts profile visible to others by changing the privacy level on your Elements profile to Public, most items WILL SHOW on Virginia Tech Experts.
There are a few exceptions:
Research (Grants) records from Elements are currently turned off for Virginia Tech Experts.
We will be working with the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs to identify a method for profile users to show grants that are permitted to be shared publicly. These would then display on the 'Research' section of Virginia Tech Experts profiles.
For now, you can craft a 'Research Interests' statement (in your Elements Profile) to summarize your research areas, practices, and other information, such as awarded grants. This statement will display on the Research section of your Virginia Tech Experts profile.
Professional Activities record types that are turned off for Virginia Tech Experts:
Promotion / Tenure Assessments
Service to Students
These items are turned off to avoid accidentally sharing confidential information.
Teaching Activities record types that are turned off for Virginia Tech Experts:
Graduate student supervisions
Graduate examinations
Undergraduate student supervisions
Student advising
House officer supervisions
Mentoring.
These items are turned off to avoid sharing student names and other student information without permission or in violation of FERPA.
Note: You can choose to make any item in Elements internal on Experts (for Scholarly Works, Teaching, Professional Activities) or private (for Profile items - see profile screenshot example below with 'private' marked for a profile portion). In other words, it will display on Elements but not on Experts. Here's an example of an internal item on the profile that will not display on Experts:
Changes made in Elements are reflected within a few minutes in Virginia Tech Experts. If you are concerned that data in Virginia Tech Experts may pose an immediate risk, please hide the relevant data in your Elements profile (see Step 2 on this guide).
If any questions about how to edit profile information, please reach out to experts@vt.edu
Review your profile, update or hide information, and make it public on Experts.
Review the information in your Elements Records and in your Elements Profile
Click on the profile icon on the left-hand side.
Scroll down through to review existing profile information and publications, teaching activities, and professional activities
To Update Information
Profile Information
Menu - Profile - Select 'Switch to Edit Mode'
To change your Name, go to Menu - My Profile - About Me - Select 'Set Preferred Name'
Set your preferred first name and surname. Select 'Update preferred name'
To change your Prefix (Mr., Ms., Dr., etc.), contact your HR rep; this data is imported directly from Banner. Your department Banner representative can change it. The Banner field is called spbpers_name_prefix on the screen PPAIDEN. Elements updates information from Banner monthly, so once your data is corrected in Banner it may take a few weeks for the change to be reflected in Elements.
Upload a photo or add a new one
Review or consider adding a Contact method, such as an Email Address or Work Phone Number
Add or Update Profile information that you'd like to display like:
About section (most useful on your Experts profile), includes:
Overview (or bio);
Research interests;
Teaching summary:
Academic Appointments;
Non-Academic Employment;
Education degrees, certificates, postgraduate training:
Language competencies;
Web addresses (including lab websites, professional profile links, Google Scholar Profile) and Social Media;
Media (YouTube videos only at present) related to your teaching, research, creative works, or outreach:
Consider adding Virginia Tech Experts-focused fields in your Elements profile, such as:
Fields of Research, or the subject tags that you select (type in broader / general fields and select the relevant ones);
Availability categories indicating your availability to: mentor, collaborate, and more;
UN Sustainable Development Goals (if applicable):
Scholarly & Creative Works (Publications), Teaching Activities, Professional Activities
Navigate to Menu - My Work - Scholarly & Creative Works / Professional Activities / Teaching Activities
NOTE: on Scholarly & Creative Works records section includes all forms of scholarship - presentations, journal articles, books, exhibitions, performances, patents, and more.
Click on the title of the item you wish to edit
Click on the 'Edit Record' icon to make changes.
If the record is a Manual record that you added yourself, any edits you make and save will show right away in your Virginia Tech Experts profile.
For automated records from databases and Banner, you can select 'Add Manual Record.' save the new Manual Record, edit/update it, and this new record will now display.
For detailed information on how to add or edit scholarly & creative works in Elements, see the the Scholarly & Creative Works (Publications) page, Step 4 (optional): Edit/Fix scholarly and creative work entries.
Questions? Contact us for assistance at: experts@vt.edu
Go to Menu - Profile - Select Switch to Edit Mode
On your Profile page Change the overall Profile Privacy Level from Internal to Public
Now you can select 'View my public profile' on Experts:
