Today we’re rolling out the next bundle of improvements for individuals who are using Interfolio to collect and present their academic materials (including the ability to include images and videos)—both in our Dossier product for candidates and in our ByCommittee platform for institutions.
Investing in your digital tools for presenting your work
This release is really a continuation of other recent investments we’ve made in the tools available to scholars to collect, organize, and submit their academic work through Interfolio. As with all of our product development decisions, we made these moves because this is what our partners at over 125 institutions told us would make the most significant improvements for their academic searches and reviews.
Supporting audio and visual materials is something that we’ve heard about for some time from many institutions as a high priority in order to successfully review the work of either current faculty or new applicants online. It’s a consideration that applies to a slew of major fields: visual art, film, theatre, dance, music, architecture, computer science, anthropology, biology, and others.
In addition, we’ve extended the full document preview feature to everyone who uses an Interfolio account to manage their academic materials—another need we’ve heard about from our university partners. Because it’s pretty important that you can be sure what your tenure packet or job application looks like to the committee on the other end.
Images, videos, and URLs as academic materials
Starting today, you can store image files and video links (YouTube and Vimeo) as materials in your Dossier. And institutions using ByCommittee to run academic searches or faculty reviews can accept these types of media in applications and promotion/tenure cases.
With images, you can now upload image files the same way that you could upload other kinds of files.
When it comes to videos, we support content stored on YouTube and on Vimeo. These are essentially the two most widely-used services for storing and distributing videos online.
- YouTube: Create videos and manage your channel
- Vimeo: Upload your videos to Vimeo
In addition to these two media types, we’ve added the ability to store URLs—such as for a web project or personal website—as items in your Interfolio account. We know there are kinds of academic and creative work that can’t be saved as a PDF, and you may have other digital materials living online somewhere that you would like to store alongside the more conventional academic materials in your account.
Document Previewing
We’ve also raised the bar on file storage across our platform, ensuring that all candidates through Interfolio now have a reliable, easy way to preview how their materials appear to the person or committee receiving them. Specifically, we’ve added an in-browser viewer for documents and images, as well as a video playback feature.
If you have an Interfolio Dossier account, this preview feature actually replaces the previous “Details” pane, making the preview experience standard for everything you have stored with us. So now, whether you’re just organizing your career materials, applying for a new opportunity, or going up for a faculty review, you can view your materials the way that the person on the other end will see them.
We’re excited for what these developments will mean for the faculty and staff who use our technology to manage faculty career decisions, whether from the individual or the institutional side. We owe a lot to the many thoughtful suggestions and observations from our university partners, so please let us know if you have comments or questions about this release. More good things are to come before the end of 2016.