Since our last update back in May, we鈥檝e made steady progress in a number of areas in response to community feedback.
Research centres, groups and institutes
A further 63 research institutes and groups have been established on our new Drupal website platform since May, which means that we鈥檝e now transitioned over two thirds of those that are active. These 200+ research entities can be found here. Our ten newly-appointed, faculty-embedded, digital content staff members are working closely with colleagues in the remaining research entities to help those transition in the coming weeks.
Staff profiles
Our focus here has been on the resilience of the systems that dynamically render staff profiles on the website from content created in Pure (our research information management system). A number of improvements have been made, with the result that all narrative content (About, Research, Supervision, Teaching, Biography) is coming through effectively and previous issues with staff being displayed in research entities in line with keyword-tagging have been resolved.
The 鈥楧r鈥� form of address in Staff 福利着片er listings and staff profile pages has been resolved, so that it no longer uses the long-form Doctor.
Finally in this area, we鈥檙e looking forward to being able to provide staff profiles for part-time lecturers and visiting academics. This will be a progressive process, as we鈥檒l need to balance the rate of profile creation with the capacity of our Library team to validate the academic publications we expect to be submitted. We appreciate the patience of colleagues as we roll this out; the first tranche of visiting academics will be enabled from mid-September and faculty-embedded digital content staff will co-ordinate the effort.
Technical initiatives
The third-party, website technical review is progressing well. While the review will not be reporting until the end of August, we have already identified some benefits and work is under way to implement interim recommendations. Most notable is a new methodology, based on the Drupal Migrate module, which will replace our current publications importer. This piece of work is due to reach fruition in the latter part of August and should result in a complete archive of research outputs feeding through to the website. Separately, our iSolutions development team has also resolved an issue that was resulting in duplicate publications appearing in some staff profiles and research entity pages.
Content development and implementation
Schools鈥� and departments鈥� web pages have been undergoing review and proposals for developing these have been created through a collaborative approach with heads of schools, their representatives and other stakeholders. With approval from the Web Oversight Board (WOB), we are now engaging with colleagues in faculties to build out improved schools and departments pages at scale.
After agreement from senior stakeholders, we are also progressing with work to research and develop News content on the new corporate site from September onwards.
There is still more to do to transition content from the legacy content management system onto the new Drupal platform, as well as making continuous improvements to the website and its content. The delivery roadmap for this work will continue to be carefully considered and prioritised by the Web Oversight Board.
