Stanford University is a large research institution, with over $1.6 billion in sponsored research. Along with other sources of funding, this produces an enormous amount of research. The results of this work are published in journals or books, presented at conferences, taught in classes and workshops, and captured in data sets. In order to help Stanford work towards new opportunities and fulfill its mission, we seek to better understand and catalog this research output, capture it in preservable form, and understand how it is interconnected.
Stanford currently maintains separate systems for tracking researchers, grants, publications and projects, but it has no system for combining this information and further tracking and managing its research output: the tangible artifacts of articles, data, books and projects that advance human knowledge. As a library project, RIALTO will close that loop, helping provide a holistic picture of the University’s activity and impact, while also eliminating waste through inefficient, duplicate data entry and opportunity costs stemming from lack of information.
RIALTO will do this by providing services that pull together these disparate date and provide custom analytics reports. The goal is to provide insignt into Stanford's research output for strategtic decision making, as well as services that can be used by other campus systems to assist faculty and staff in the research and teaching.
