Doug Leavell, Director of Research Analytics, shared on Digital Measures during a recent OSP Lunch & Learn.

What is Digital Measures? Digital Measures supports a faculty-activity reporting tool called Activity Insight for capturing teaching, research, creative activities and service information. At CSU, we have adopted the acronym FSAS (Faculty and Staff Activity System) for our implementation and use of this tool. Information in the system can be mined for use in faculty evaluations, resume building, creation of proposal biographical sketches, and more. Currently CSU is tracking data for tenured and tenure-track faculty, with some exceptions, in FSAS.

What type of information is being tracked in FSAS? Scholarly information such as courses taught, graduate students mentored, publications, presentations, creative activities, service to the university and community, membership in professional organizations, and grant proposals- both submitted and awarded- are captured in FSAS.  Some of this information can be auto-populated from University systems such as Kuali Research, and some imported from external systems such as EndNote, Google Scholar and PubMed. That which cannot be auto-populated or imported must be entered by the faculty. Tutorials, video and quick guides for using the system are provided on the FSAS site under “Training.” Help is also available from dedicated IT persons in each college or by contacting Doug Leavell.

What does this mean for me? While administrators cannot currently use FSAS for their personal data, they can assist faculty by requesting an enabled account from their college IT representative. Faculty will be able to use FSAS to build NIH and NSF biographical sketches as well as department and college reports. Administrators with an enabled account can pull biographical information and current and pending support documentation needed for proposals. A word of caution: if faculty have not signed their internal proposal record (Kuali Research IP record) or have not routed it for signature, their proposal-related data will not show up in FSAS.

Bottom line: Data output is only as good as data input. Faculty should always verify information coming out of FSAS. Manual entries can be made for information not currently captured in CSU systems, and by extracting data in an editable format (e.g., MSWord or .cvs), faculty can tweak data as needed.