Organizations

You will want to have organizations in your VIVO for a number of reasons:

1. Organizations are the units of your institution -- your colleges, academic departments, administrative units, and laboratories. By representing your organization and its structure (which organizations are parts of others) you will be able to produce reports and visualizations based on your organizational structure, and answer questions such as number of faculty per organization, number of mentors, expertise at the organizational level, productivity and other other assessments.
2. Organizations are the places where your people had positions prior to being at your institution.
3. Organizations are the places where your people were educated.
4. Organizations are the places that provided grant funding to your organization.
5. Organizations are the places where your faculty have collaborators that they work with on scholarship.
6. Organizations are the places where your graduates are now employed.

To put organizations in VIVO, you will want to have a spreadsheet of the organizations that you can use to manage the organizational data. As organizations come and go, add and remove them from your spreadsheet. As more information about organizations becomes available, or as organizational information changes (contact information, web pages, etc), make the updates in your spreadsheet. Use Simple VIVO to update VIVO using the values in your spreadsheet (see below).

examples/orgs

examples/orgs contains the files you need to manage organizations using Simple VIVO.

Your spreadsheet data will have the columns shown in the table below. If you need more or fewer columns, your VIVO site administrator should be able to help you modify the org_def.json file distributed with Simple VIVO to provide the organizational attributes you need.

Column name	Purpose
uri	The VIVO uri of the organization. VIVO assigns a uri to every organization in VIVO.
remove	Used to remove organizations from your VIVO.
name	The name of the organization precisely as it will appear in VIVO
home_page	the URL of the home page of the organization
email	The email address of the organization
phone	The phone number of the organization
within	The name of another organization which is the parent of this one
address1 Address line 1 for the organization
address2	Address line 2 for the organization
city	The name of the city of the organization
state	The name of the state of the organization
zip	the sip code (postal code) of the organization
abbreviation	An abbreviation for the organization. "NIH" for the National Institutes of Health, for example
overview	A paragraph of text regarding the organization
type	The organization's types. See below. Many organizations have multiple types.
successor	The name of the successor to the organization if it no longer exists

Future

We expect to be able to manage photos of organizations in the future. Check back here to see if Simple VIVO supports photos.