Client Support login

VIVO Harvester Upgrade

← Back24th October 2012Blog

The Symplectic VIVO Harvester

In 2011, Symplectic released their first version of the VIVO harvester on GitHub. This code was used to build the harvester for the first institutional VIVO instance in the UK. With the rich data sets available to Elements, clients are able to automatically populate and maintain external VIVO profiles for all their research staff.

Significant upgrades in 2012

As part of our continuing commitment to the VIVO project, we are pleased to announce that we have just released our first major upgrade to the VIVO Harvester. This has brought a host of new features and significant improvements to the core system, which include:

  • Up to 60x faster
  • Reduced API traffic to the Elements database
  • Differential updating to running VIVO instances
  • Reorganised cache to accommodate a larger number of instances
  • Restructured XSL for easier maintenance

Many more small features have been added, greatly reducing load times and maximising the overall efficiency of the harvester. For the full details, head over to our support site.

“This upgrade brings much smoother updates to VIVO, as only the changes since the last harvest are applied.” says Graham Triggs, Head of Repository systems, Symplectic, who has led the upgrade of the harvester. “By using the Symplectic API efficiently, we minimize the impact on both the VIVO and Elements services, improving the user experience.”

If you would like to fork our open source harvester, you can find it on GitHub at this link.

Remember you can always get in touch with one of our team if you want to find out more.

More on VIVO

The VIVO project was initially started in Cornell as an open source web application to collate research and scholarship information within an institution and then provide academics with an institutional profile.

Head over to VIVO to find out more.

With this partnership, we have the opportunity to position ourselves as
a world leader in the development of the scholarly ecosystem.

Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon

I cannot overstate how pleased we have been.
We have to have confidence to work with a partner
for at least 5 years on a project of this size.

Caleb Smith, Senior Strategy Manager for Research Intelligence & Analytics, University of Michigan

“Faculty need only spend perhaps less than an hour a year to prepare and submit their annual reports.”

Associate Dean, Carnegie Mellon University at Qatar

"Leveraging the interoperability between Symplectic Elements and DSpace has increased policy-driven institutional repository deposits by over 350%."

Ellen Phillips, Open Access Specialist, Boston University

Elements elegantly connected our multi-university system providing a
single source of truth throughout OIEx.

Tim Cain, The Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx)

The University measures the individual research activity of academic staff. This Measure of Research Activity (MoRA) requires the collection of publication data from faculty. Symplectic Elements supports this beautifully.

Floris van der Leest, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

[Elements] will help to bring transparency to the richness of thought showcased within non-traditional publications, providing a more holistic representation of faculties’ scholarly work.

Caleb Smith, University of Michigan

Feedback to date has been extremely positive from all levels across the University, with individual academics and colleagues actively promoting the ease of use of the system.

Rachel Baird, Research Policy Analyst, University of Liverpool
Symplectic

Find out more about our products or services and to request a free no obligation demo

Get in touch