Elements Faculty Activity System: Overview Workshop and Drop-In Q&A

Term: Fall 2026

Date: December 14th, 2026

Time: 1:00 to 2:00 p.m.

Location: Online Only

Presented By: University Libraries (LIB)

Description:

Virginia Tech Elements, a faculty activity repository, supports a variety of purposes, including department, college, and institutional analytics and reporting; the Virginia Tech Experts public profile system; and electronic Faculty Activity Reports (eFARs). In this hands-on session, Rachel Miles and Ben Greenawald will provide an overview workshop while also offering drop-in office hours for questions and individualized support.

Overview Workshop:  
One of the instructors will provide an introduction to Elements, including new interface features and functionality available with the latest system upgrade, as well as instructions for generating Faculty Activity Reports (FARs) through the University Data Commons (UDC). We will help faculty understand how information entered and maintained in Elements maps to specific sections and headings in their FAR documents, including how these mappings can vary by college. Topics will include an overview of system functionality; strategies for optimizing automatic updates of scholarly works; and how to manually add and edit different types of activity information. We will also cover depositing scholarly works into VTechWorks to make your publications openly accessible and, if time permits, managing information in the Virginia Tech Experts public profile system, which draws activity data from Elements. The workshop will include time for discussion and questions.

Office Hours Q&A:
Drop in at any point during the session to ask a question or type it into the chat. While one presenter leads the overview workshop, the other will monitor the chat and respond to questions. If a question requires more than a brief response, a presenter can meet with individual participants in a breakout room to provide more focused, one-on-one support.


Course Objectives:

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to connect researcher identifiers for automatic importing of scholarly works, modify search settings for optimized system searching of scholarly works, and manually add works in the Elements system for all activity types. 

In addition, participants will be able to download their college FAR template and identify where specific activities map to the FAR, download their FAR, modify records in Elements to map to their FAR accurately. 

Participants will also learn how to modify privacy settings, fill out their profile information, and make their profile public on Virginia Tech Experts.