Overview of Building Vitas in the New Vita Builder
The new vita builder is a new user experience around building and exporting faculty CVs via Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR, Faculty180). It includes improvements and new features that allow both administrative and faculty users greater control and flexibility when setting up and generating vitas based upon data in the system.
Check out our article Overview of Vitas and Templates in the New Vita Builder for further guidance.
Overview of Building Vitas in the New Vita Builder
Benefits
The new experience for building vitas and vita templates through Interfolio FAR offers improved formatting and flexibility that should:
- Better reflect all faculty work in vitas. The upgraded vitas will allow both the institution and individual faculty members to better represent all academic accomplishments, and leverage the data in the system to achieve professional goals, including advancement at the institution, annual reviews, grant applications and progress reports for funding, and applications for sabbaticals or other opportunities.
- Better meet institutional CV formatting needs. The upgraded vitas will make it easier for administrators who are setting up vita templates and workflows to ensure CVs reflect the institution’s standards and reflect the individual faculty member’s particular discipline and background.
Changes
- New interface for building and managing vitas
- Choose from an expanded list of citation formats when creating a vita for export
- Add stylized custom text to a generated vita
- Create and manage personal vita templates
- Sections can be renamed
- Sections now have more robust grouping capabilities
- New options for styling vitas
- Ability to archive templates
- Changes to templates will be logged for reporting
Features and Limitations
Current Features
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| More citation styles | See this help article for our full list of supported citation styles. |
| Personal templates | Faculty now have access to all data about their work that has been input into Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting, and can use that data to generate a personal vita. |
| Flexible section header naming | When using the new vita builder either to create a vita template or to generate a vita, any section can be renamed. It does not need to adhere to the name set for that section in the database. For example, “Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions” can be renamed to “Publications” in either a particular vita template or an individual vita. |
| Expanded and improved grouping options |
|
| Expanded styling options |
New styling options for Titles, Section Header(s), and new text styling options for:
|
| Option to add custom text to a generated vita | Stylized freeform text can be added by a faculty member to any generated vita (personal or institutional) without overwriting the template. |
| Option to preview changes to templates | When editing a template (for styling, layout, or other changes), the new vita builder gives the option to preview what a generated vita will look like without emulating a user or generating a real vita. |
| Improved activity logging | The Activity log now includes emulation and template editing. |
| Option to archive templates | |
| Option to duplicate sections in templates |
New Features
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| New interface for building a vita |
There is a new process for building vitas for export or sharing and a new tabbed interface for managing vitas. The new tabbed interface displays Personal Vitas, Institutional Vitas, and Archived Vitas. The Add New Vita button opens a window where the user:
|
| Choose from an expanded list of citation styles |
Users can select a citation format for the vita from a dropdown list when formatting a vita for output. Available Citation Styles:
|
| Add custom text |
The user can now add and edit freeform and formatted custom text to a generated vita. Note that the new Add Custom Text feature for a generated vita is not supported with FAR to RPT integration. The Far to RPT integration generates a Vita in real-time based on a template (not by pulling a personalized, generated vita directly from a user’s account). |
| More styling options for vitas | Note that the first release will not permit the bolding of the author amongst a list of co-authors/co-contributors within a publication. |
| Create personal templates |
Faculty and administrators can use a new interface to create and manage templates for personal vitas. Administrators can use the same new interface to create institutional templates.
|
| Rename section headers | Users can now customize the name of vita sections as part of customizing template settings. Users can also use the setting window to add section descriptions, display styles, sort order, numbering, and links to attachments. |
| Sections now have more robust grouping capabilities |
Note that activities cannot be rearranged or reordered in personal vitas. |
| Manage templates | A tabbed interface displays Active and Archived templates. |
| Archive a template | Templates can easily be archived, which will remove the archived template from active use. Archived templates will appear on the Archived Templates tab of the template list and can easily be restored. |
| Preview template changes | Users can preview styling or layout changes without having to emulate a user and generate a vita. |
| Logging | All changes made to vita templates are logged for audit/review purposes. Administrators can view or download a CSV of this log for auditing purposes. |
| Columns in Template Tables |
Faculty can show and hide columns in tabular view for custom sections. This gives users a one-to-one relationship between table column data and data rendered within the Vita. Please be aware that if the tabular display style is selected for scholarly citations, the show/hide capabilities for columns may be limited.
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Limitations
- More limited biosketch approach: It is strongly recommended scholars use the government-mandated SciENcv platform for NIH, NSF, and AHRQ grant applications requiring a biosketch.
- The new Add Custom Text feature for a generated vita will not be supported when using vitas from the new vita builder in Interfolio Review, Promotion & Tenure cases
- The option to rearrange/reorder individual activities will not be available in a generated personal vita. Instead, the order of activities is controlled via template sections
- Vitas from the new vita builder will not be available for use in the legacy Faculty180 evaluations feature set.
- Scholarly Citations Display: We do not recommend using the tabular display style for scholarly citations. We recommend listing, traditional, or traditional-date styles. Please be aware that if the tabular display style is selected for scholarly citations, the show/hide capabilities for columns may be limited.
- Vita Builder Functionality: Vita Builder supports filtering and grouping in tabular format via a pre-determined drop-down list. It is important to note that users cannot filter or group based on open text entries in tabular format.