Original CollabFinder Specifications

Vision Statement

To create a centralised, user friendly web-based tool to find diverse personnel within the BCCA, both current and past, by their expertise for collaboration, advice or giving presentations.

About the BCCA

The BC Cancer Agency, an agency of the Provincial Health Services Authority, provides a province-wide, population-based cancer control program for the residents of British Columbia and the Yukon. The BC Cancer Agency’s mandate covers the spectrum of cancer care, from prevention and screening, to diagnosis, treatment, and through to rehabilitation. In addition to being the primary provider healthcare provider in the region for cancer patients, the BCCA has a research centre, the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre (BCCRC), dedicated to not only finding the causes of cancer, but to finding better treatments for prolonged life and better quality of life.

About this Project

This project is funded by a portion of a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research infrastructure grant. These funds are to be used to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information between clinical and research staff, in the aims of ultimately improving patient care and outcomes.

General Properties

• The system will have a “read-only” portion visible to the public.
• The system will also have an administrative interface, restricted to the BCCRC internal network, and requiring authentication via the BCCRC authentication system.
• The system should integrate with the new BCCRC website. Note: this is currently under development as a Plone site. The current plan for integration is to provide templates for PIs to use to populate entries for the staff under them. We have some ability to influence the design/development of that site.
• Population of the database will be carried out separately, following development

Core Model – Information to be Captured about Personnel

• Core personal information – name, title(s), role(s), phone, email
• Keywords describing fields of research, both free form and selected from the topics used in CIHR grant applications (we can provide this)
• Keywords describing technical expertise
• A short paragraph providing a lay summary of their research and/or expertise
• A list of current collaborators, both within the BCCRC, and externally
• A list of awards and distinctions
• Current posting information if the person is an alumnus (this will be stored alongside their previous posting information)

System Components

The desired functionality can be broken up into four main components:

# A page or pages displaying information about a single person # A search page for finding personnel # A page or pages for editing information about a single person # An administrative interface for creating and deleting personnel

View Person Page(s)

• Must display all the information about a person, on a single or multiple pages
• Should provide links from the keyword fields to searches based on those keywords

Update Person Page(s)

• Must enable all information about a person to be edited
• Must be access restricted to only the person’s account it corresponds to, and administrators
• Should enable internal collaborators to be found and linked correctly
• Should suggest keywords for the keyword fields based on keywords that have already been used
• Should enable publications to be imported by PubMed ID
• Could detect other authors’ names on a publication and allow for the publication to be linked to their profiles too

Search Page

• Must allow searching by any of the fields captured about a person
• Must allow further filtering of search results by other fields
• Must display a list of search results containing basic information about personnel (name, department, position) as well as the fields searched against.
• Must contain links to personnel pages for each person in search results
• Must have a secured feature to generate printable output (as HTML), containing any combination of fields for the list of personnel found
• Could have a function to export search results as CSV

Administration Page(s)

• Must allow users to be created and deleted New accounts should be linked to BCCRC authentication
• Should send an email to new users on creation on how to keep their account up to date