It was mentioned in the April issue of this Newsletter that the Library was in the process of creating author profiles in the Scholarly Publications Database (http://spfind.ust.hk) for our current faculty. We are delighted to report that the launching of the profiles (http://library.ust.hk/spi-author) has been completed and it was extremely successful.

Between April and June, the Library sent 3 rounds of announcements with follow-up reminders to each school, seeking faculty's help to review their profiles, report discrepancies and send us missing publications. As a result, we received and handled over 170 problem reports and 70 CV and publication list submissions. These interactive collaboration with faculty, together with the system demonstrations in school board and department heads meetings, have helped improving the quality of the database.

We have established a database of over 47,000 records of publications produced by HKUST researchers and have released 455 profiles of current faculty members for public access. Only two to three profiles remain in restricted access, awaiting cleaning up and more data input. We also removed the "Beta" label from the banner in July and the portal is now considered in full production.

The Scholarly Publications Database is instrumental in the University's knowledge transfer initiative. It provides a one-stop portal for complete and accurate listing of research output produced by the HKUST researchers. It increases the visibility of faculty members' publications and their expertise, by exposing them to Internet search engines. Together with the features in Author Profiles, such as bibliometrics and research interests, it provides a readily available infrastructure for the creation of added-value services, to be used by the University's knowledge analysis and transfer projects.