Mendeley, a UK-based startup, has announced that Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets (MIE), the web-based research analytics dashboard and social collaboration platform, has expanded its reach into the Asia–Pacific market. The platform is being rolled out at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus. This foreign campus of the University of Nottingham in the UK joins other institutions in the region, including Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council (AFFRC) of Japan, in adopting the platform.
The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus library has a large international student base, necessitating a great degree of flexibility in the tools they use to conduct and manage their research. All libraries signing up for the MIE can roll out premium versions of Mendeley's end-user platform to all researchers across their institution. MIE's cloud-based solution has opened up new possibilities for the Campus' end users to work and collaborate remotely, an important factor for the University.
From the library point of view, keeping track of reading and publication trends among this diverse group was a huge bonus to the library. The insights provided by the tool will give the library a more central role in the research workflow undertaken across their institution and greater visibility of end-user behaviour and how to refine the library collection to meet their changing needs.
During the implementation stage, Swets and Mendeley worked with the library to build a customised citation style that, although based on the Harvard system, was unique to this institution. The possibilities for further growth in the tool's analytics capabilities and benchmarking are revealed as layers will be added to what is based on the one of the largest citation databases in existence.
