The first Impactstory Advisor of the Month for 2015 is Chris Chan, Head of Information Services at Hong Kong Baptist University Library.

We interviewed Chris to learn more about his crucial role in implementing ORCID identifiers for HKBU faculty, and also why he’s chosen to be an Impactstory Advisor. Below, he also describes his vision for the role librarians can play in bringing emerging scholarly communication technologies to campus–a vision with which we wholeheartedly agree!

Tell us a bit about your role as the Head of Information Services at the Hong Kong Baptist University Library.

My major responsibilities at HKBU Library include overseeing our instruction and reference services, and advising the senior management team on the future development and direction of these services. I’m fortunate to work with a great team of librarians and paraprofessionals, and never tire of providing information literacy instruction and research help to our students and faculty.

Scholarly communication is a growing part of my duties as well. As part of its strategic plan, the Library is exploring how it can better support the research culture at the University. One initiative that has arisen from this strategic focus is our Research Visibility Project, for which I am the coordinator.

Why did you initially decide to join Impactstory?

Scholarly communication and bibliometrics have been of great interest to me ever since I first encountered them as a newly-minted academic librarian. Furthermore, the strategic direction that the Library is taking has made keeping up to date with the latest developments in this area a must for our librarians.

When I came across Impactstory I was struck by how useful and relatively straightforward (even in that early incarnation) it was for multiple altmetrics to be presented in an attractive and easy to understand way. At the time, I had just been discussing with some of our humanities faculty how poorly served they were by traditional citation metrics. I saw immediately in Impactstory one way that this issue could be addressed.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor?

As mentioned above, in the past year or so I have become heavily involved in our scholarly communication efforts. When the call for applications to be an Advisor came out, I saw it as an opportunity to get the inside scoop on one of the tools that I am most enthusiastic about.

What’s your favorite Impactstory feature?

I would have to say that my favourite feature is the ability to add an ORCID iD to the Impactstory profile! More on why that is below.

You’ve been hard at work recently implementing ORCID at HKBU. (I especially like this video tutorial you produced!) How do you envision the library working in the future to support HKBU researchers using ORCID and other scholarly communication technologies?

Academic libraries around the world are re-positioning themselves to ensure that their collections and services remain relevant to their members. The scholarly communication environment is incredibly dynamic, and I think that librarians have an opportunity to provide tremendous value to our institutions by serving as guides to, and organizers of, emerging scholarly communication technologies.

Our ORCID initiative at HKBU is a good example of this. We have focused heavily on communicating the benefits having an ORCID iD and how in the long run this will streamline research workflows and ensure scholars receive the proper credit for their work. Another guiding principle has been to make adoption as painless as possible for our faculty. They will be able to create an ORCID iD, connect it with our system, and automatically populate it with their latest five years’ of research output (painstakingly checked for accuracy by our team), all in just a few minutes.

I believe that as information professionals, librarians are well-positioned to take on such roles. Also, in contrast to some of our more traditional responsibilities, these services bring us into close contact with faculty, raising the visibility of librarians on campus. These new relationships could open doors to further collaborations on campus.

Thanks, Chris!

As a token of our appreciation for Chris’s outreach efforts, we’re sending him an Impactstory travel mug from our Zazzle store.

Chris is just one part of a growing community of Impactstory Advisors. Want to join the ranks of some of the Web’s most cutting-edge researchers and librarians? Apply to be an Advisor today!