Abstract
Since 2017, the University of Miami Libraries (UML) has engaged with key stakeholders and institutional leaders to adapt and build a centralized, sustainable Research Information Management System (RIMS) helping to curate, manage, and promote institutional research output. This paper details the development and rollout of Esploro by Ex Libris (locally branded Scholarship@Miami), the Institutional Repository (IR), and the RIM system for the University of Miami (UM). The UML Esploro Implementation team leveraged Esploro’s Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning features to train the system to automatically capture and fetch relevant scholarly outputs produced by researchers affiliated with UM. Further, we consider the challenges we faced while developing and planning to go live with Scholarship@Miami (Esploro), particularly the difficulty of keeping the institutional leaders engaged and supportive when development took longer than anticipated. Also, we share how we pivoted to support related university initiatives by facilitating integration into the corpus of curated research data while keep proceeding with collecting scholarly outputs and expanding the researcher profiles in Scholarship@Miami. Earlier this year, the public-facing researcher profiles in scholarship@Miami went live, and over 160,000 research assets and creative works have been added to more than 4,000 Scholarship@Miami profiles to date. Although Scholarship@Miami is still a work in progress, many faculty have expressed an interest in the system and recognized its potential value to their work. Internally, librarians have utilized and analyzed Scholarship@Miami’s data to support decision-making related to transformative and open-access agreements offered by publishers. Lastly, Scholarship@Miami’s data enables UML to contribute more directly to UM research efforts, allowing librarians to expand their support in tracking and evaluating researchers' output and its impact.