Educational Background

Here we describe how to manage educational background using Simple VIVO. Degrees, institution granting the degree, person receiving the degree, date of the degree, and field of study. Should be very similar in concept and complexity to positions.

To add education backgrounds to VIVO, we need to know several pieces of information for each degree:

1. Who obtained the degree
2. What degree was obtained?
3. From what institution?
4. What is the date of the degree?
5. What is the field of study for the degree?

Managing Enumerations

Each is represented by an enumeration. This guarantees that all the information regarding education in VIVO is "coded" -- there are no open-ended text fields associated with educational background. If something can not be found in the enumerations, it will need to be added.

1. person_enum for who
2. degree_enum for what
3. school_enum for where
4. date_enum for when
5. field_enum for field of study

The python program make_enum.py can be used to update four of these enumerations from your VIVO. To run make_enum.py use:

python make_enum.py

The field of study enumeration is managed by hand -- if you have fields of study that you would like to be able to represent in VIVO, edit the field_enum.txt file with a text editor and add a row for each such field of study.

get and update as always

1. Edit your sv.cfg file to provide the query parameters for your VIVO. Your system administrator can help you with this.

2. Run get:

   python sv.py -a get

The result will be a degrees.txt file which you can open in a spreadsheet to edit the degrees for your people. Every value you enter in each of the columns should be a value in one of the enumerations. Each column has its own enumeration.

Edit your enumerations as needed to provide additional values for degrees and fields of study.

To add universities or other schools to your VIVO and make them available for your education work, use the orgs example to add the organizations, then run make_enum to update your enumerations. The new schools are now available for putting educational background in VIVO.

Once you have a spreadsheet with degrees that you would like to use to update VIVO:

1. Run update

   python sv.py -a update

The information in your degrees.txt file will be used to update degree information in VIVO.