A Case Study in Development, Workflows,
and Ongoing Support
Technical Implementation of
ORCID Support for
Texas A&M Scholars
James Creel, Senior Lead Software Applications Developer
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9108-5190

Talk Outline
 Background and Context
 Software Development Methodology
 Use Cases and Workflows
 Reflections and Future Work

Project
Background
 Institutional grant imperatives vs.
Campus IT capabilities
 Library Development Team’s role
 ORCID Assignment for all graduate
students
 Future plans for Campus-wide
identifiers

 Agile Scrum
 Cyclical development with product-owner
review for each iteration
 Daily review of feature/bug-fix
development
 Product Ownership
 Grant PI
 Customer-facing concerns
Development
Methodology

 ORCID creation for present graduate
students
 ORCID association for present
ORCID owners
 ORCID creation for future students,
faculty, and staff contributors
 Work association for ETDs (Electronic
Theses and Dissertations) from the
Vireo ETD Management System
Use Cases

 Read-access to ORCID record
 Needed to see if a student/researcher has
a record yet
 Write-access to ORCID record
 Needed to associate ETDs (electronic
theses and dissertations) with students’
records
 Central requirement of grant, as
communicated by our PI product owner
Use Cases,
Continued:
Institutional
Concerns

 Email prelude sent to students based
on campus records
 ORCID creation script - as a member
institution, we are permitted to create
a record for each of our graduate
students
 This does invoke a request for each
scholar’s acknowledgement/claim
 It behooves us to provide a
middleware application for TAMU
scholars to manage their ORCID
accounts during their association with
the University
Workflows
(1):
Mass ORCID
Creation

 The essential element of the grant as
communicated by our PI
 The ORCID is now a field in the Vireo
ETD Submission/Management
system and provided by campus
LDAP if available
 Vireo records can be exported in the
ORCID Works XML format to be read
TAMU Libraries middleware
Workflows
(2):
ETD works

ETD Work (in batch) is exported from
Vireo
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

ETD Work (in batch) is exported from
Vireo
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

ORCID Management App – Front Page
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

ORCID Management App – Upload
Vireo Export Zipfile of Work XML Docs
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

ORCID Management App – Zipfile
Upload console information
Workflows:
Technical
View of ETD
Addition

ORCID Central –following email link to
provide authorization
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

ORCID Central Redirects to ORCID
Middleware
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

ORCID Central Redirects to ORCID
Middleware – console output

ORCID Central Reflects Work Addition
Workflows:
Adding ETDs

Reflections
and Future
Work
 Emails to graduates
(potentially months after ETD
submittal) may not succeed…
 Our PI is pursuing a
delegation of update privileges
that occurs during Vireo
workflow

Reflections
and Future
Work – Recent
Developments
 ORCID values have recently
been put into campus LDAP
and made deliverable in
Shibboleth payloads
 Vireo and our ORCID
Management App are already
enabled to receive this
information – we will further
enable our IR and other
applications as we are able.

Reflections
and Future
Work
 Currently planning for
production roll-out
 Developer wish-list
 Mock ORCID-central server for
unit-testing
 Pure HTML5/Angular.js frontend
uncoupled from Middleware API
for next generation of the
software