Founded in 1956 as the Hong Kong Baptist College, we started receiving Government funding in 1983 and achieved University status in 1994.

One of the eight publicly-funded universities in Hong Kong. HKBU ranks as one of the smaller institutions, and is certainly the smallest comprehensive university in the city.

About 11,000 students spread across seven Faculties and Schools.

We have around 800 full-time faculty, of which about half are expected to engage in research as part of their duties.

More information can be found at: http://gao.hkbu.edu.hk/en/download/other_admin/The_University_at_a_Glance_2...

The Research Visibility Project was proposed by the University Library and approved by the University’s senior managers in early 2014. The overarching goal of the project is to provide support to help our researchers maximize the impact of their work.

In addition to initiatives such as further developing our institutional repository, we included the institutional adoption of ORCID as one component of the project.

The prospect of having accurate, public research information for our faculty was attractive.

Also, the author disambiguation problem is particularly acute when there are many staff with a Chinese cultural background.

1. To make the task manageable, we have collected only the data for the immediate past five years, for faculty that still currently serve with the University. We are only actively creating accounts and seeking consent from the 400 or so faculty with research responsibilities, but support will be offered to any member of the University that is interested.

2. We are designing a database that will integrate the ORCID API functionality – this will hopefully be completed by the end of this year. We are also conscious of the need to take data privacy and consent issues seriously, and our system will include a mechanism to collect consent from faculty and allow them to opt-out if they so desire.

3. At the time of creation, we will include all the works data that we have. As of yet, we are not sure whether we will continue updating ORCID accounts once they are created.

This was obviously crucial to getting the project approved. In our case, a librarian was in a casual meeting with faculty members where the issue of author disambiguation was mentioned. The librarian brought up and explained ORCID – this discussion was the catalyst for the eventual proposal and approval of the research visibility project.

We underestimated the technical expertise that is needed to, for example, work with the ORCID APIs. We were fortunate in that one of the Research Assistants we hired was able to teach himself quite a lot. Additionally, we have been receiving fantastic support from the Library’s Systems Section. However, in hindsight we should have taken into account the need for programming expertise.

Coordinating and collaborating with other offices has proved particularly challenging. This is especially so given the nature of our institution which, like many other universities, is relatively bureaucratic. Getting things done at the institutional level is time-consuming, and we probably did not fully appreciate this fact at the outset.

From the beginning, we have been realistic in terms of our expectations with regards to the faculty. Most have not heard of ORCID, and like all academics they are busy with their teaching, research, and service activities. We certainly do not want to just send them an e-mail out of the blue telling them that they need to sign up for an ORCID identifier. Our outreach efforts have included the following:

- Attendance by the University Librarian and myself at Faculty Board Meetings to give a brief 10-minute overview of the project

- Development of a project website

- Enlistment of Departmental liaison librarians to spread the word

- Organization of in-person outreach sessions

This is the first reaction of most faculty when I tell them about ORCID!

We have been emphasizing the following points when talking with faculty:

- Benefits that ORCID will bring to them, especially in terms of research workflows and visibility

- The fact that in our institutional adoption, the only thing we need from them is their consent. If they do not want to use their ORCID, they don’t have to (although of course we hope they will!)