Want to know who's doing what, where and how in some particular field of scientific research at Cornell? You'll probably find the answers in Cornell Library's VIVO at http://vivo.cornell.edu/.

A VIVO search transcends college and departmental boundaries and returns not only the names of researchers but also grants and recent publications, facilities, undergraduate majors and graduate fields, and seminars and other events. When President David Skorton travels to Africa and wants to know about relevant Cornell faculty and research, VIVO has the answer.

Soon a similar capability may extend across the nation. A $12.2 million, two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources will support the creation of VIVOweb, a multi-institutional version of VIVO that will connect biomedical researchers, initially at seven sites. The goal is to foster alliances, making biomedical research and discovery move faster.

The project is led by the University of Florida with Cornell and Indiana University-Bloomington as major partners. Scripps Research Institute, Ponce Medical School, Washington University and Weill Cornell Medical College will participate as implementation sites.

VIVO was launched in 2003 by Jon Corson-Rikert, head of information technology services at Mann Library, as a way to connect Cornell people and resources in the life sciences. As researchers and administrators embraced the newly created network, the project expanded to all other disciplines at Cornell, and what had begun as a database populated by hand evolved to use automated tools to download content from databases across the university.

The technology underlying VIVO has also changed, from a relational database in which data is stored in simple rows and columns to a "Semantic Web" structure in which data is linked to definitions and rules for reasoning about it, which enables machines to infer relationships. The transition was managed by Mann Library programmers Brian Lowe and Brian Caruso with direction from Corson-Rikert. The free, open-source VIVO software has been adopted for local networks at other universities and institutions in the United States, Australia and China.

"Before VIVO, the library heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn't find collaborators from different disciplines across campus. The idea of VIVO was to transcend administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly interaction," said Medha Devare, bioinformatics and life sciences librarian. "Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical community will be able to benefit from that bird's-eye perspective of their research."

Cornell will spearhead the development of the VIVOweb software, which lets other institutions implement their own VIVO systems, and then interconnect them. The work will be led by Dean Krafft, Cornell Library's chief technology strategist, Corson-Rikert and Devare. "The idea is to make it adaptable to local stuff, but have the hooks in it to interconnect," Krafft explained.

Florida will help create automated systems to collect data at each site and develop marketing tools to make other institutions aware of the system. "This will be a pilot at seven institutions and a model to market it to the broad biomedical research community," Krafft said.

Indiana will develop Facebook-like social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests through recommendations or suggestion networks based on commonalities described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.

Librarians and information technology strategists at each institution will work together to assist researchers and eventually build the national network.