Knowledge Base

In HORTUS, the Experts area is the platform’s structured space for discovering researchers, understanding their work, and building scholarly connections. It is the human layer of HORTUS. While Projects show research initiatives and the Marketplace shows research outputs, the Experts area shows the people behind them: the scholars, contributors, collaborators, and specialists who give life to the platform’s research community.

An Expert in HORTUS is not just a name in a directory. An expert profile is a structured scholarly identity page that can present biography, affiliation, location, expertise, interests, projects, CV, and publications in a single place. This makes the Experts area much more than a contact list. It becomes a discovery environment where users can understand who is working on what, how a person’s expertise is described, which projects they are connected to, and whether they appear open to collaboration.

The Experts feature serves three major purposes.

First, it is a discovery tool for collaboration. Researchers often arrive on a platform not knowing exactly who they need, only what kind of expertise they are looking for. They may need someone with a particular disciplinary background, a specific language competence, a methodological skill, or experience with a given type of source. The Experts directory is designed to support exactly this kind of discovery. It allows users to browse profiles, filter them, search by keyword, and sort results in a way that makes expert identification faster and more practical. In this sense, Experts helps the user move from a general research need to a concrete person who may become a collaborator, contact, or point of reference.

Second, it is a visibility tool for researchers themselves. A strong expert profile helps a researcher become discoverable inside the HORTUS ecosystem. This is particularly important in interdisciplinary environments, where people may not know each other in advance and where a profile often becomes the first point of contact. A well-curated profile provides the professional context that others need to trust the person behind the work: a short biography, institutional affiliation, location, disciplinary tags, expertise, interests, CV, and publications. In practical terms, the better the profile is completed, the easier it becomes for others to find the right person and understand why that person matters for a given project or research question.

Third, it is a communication and engagement tool. The Experts feature does not stop at passive profile viewing. Public profiles expose concrete engagement actions such as Message, Add to favourites / Follow, and Download CV. This means that the user can move directly from discovery to action. If a profile looks relevant, the user may start a conversation from inside HORTUS rather than moving immediately to external email. If the person looks interesting for future work but no message is needed yet, the profile can be favourited and, where enabled, followed for updates. This gives the Experts area a practical, living role in the platform: it supports both immediate contact and lighter forms of scholarly awareness.

One of the most important ideas to explain to users is that the Experts feature works at two levels: the directory level and the profile level.

At the directory level, the user browses and filters the community. The list view is designed for quick orientation. It can show cards or rows with a person’s name, short description, organisation, and visible expertise signals. The directory also supports functional controls such as keyword search, sorting, and filtering by collaboration status. In particular, the Open to collaborations filter is important because it helps users identify profiles that explicitly signal availability for scholarly interaction. For a young researcher, this can be one of the easiest ways to identify approachable contacts inside the platform.

At the profile level, the user shifts from scanning to evaluation. This is where an expert becomes understandable as a scholarly person rather than just a result in a list. A public expert profile can bring together biography, affiliation, location, structured tags such as SSD, Expertise, and Interests, project links, CV attachments, and publication entries. These elements help the reader answer practical questions: What does this person work on? Are they relevant for my topic? Are they embedded in the same project space? Do they look like someone I should contact, follow, or cite? This is why the profile page is central to the whole feature: it is the point where discoverability turns into scholarly judgment.

A particularly strong aspect of the Experts feature is its emphasis on structured discoverability. The profile is not only descriptive; it is searchable. Fields such as SSD, Expertise, and Interests are not there only for display. They help make profiles comparable, searchable, and easier to match with research needs. In practice, these tags create bridges between users and opportunities. A researcher searching the directory may not know a person’s name, but they may know they need expertise in manuscript studies, IIIF, digital humanities, or a particular disciplinary area. Structured profile fields allow the platform to support that kind of targeted discovery.

Another attractive element for users is the balance between visibility and control. HORTUS does not force researchers into full public exposure. Through the Public Profile area, each user can manage how visible and contactable they want to be. The profile owner can review and adjust toggles such as Open to collaborations, Show public email, and Show profile as public. This is very important because academic visibility is rarely an all-or-nothing choice. A researcher may want to be visible in the directory without exposing all contact information or may want to show a collaboration signal without making every detail public. HORTUS treats visibility as something configurable rather than fixed.

The Public Profile area is also where the researcher maintains and enriches their own scholarly identity. The platform supports both manual editing and ORCID-based updating. Manual editing makes the feature inclusive: even if a person does not have a complete ORCID record, they can still build a strong and professional profile by adding links, biography, affiliation, SSD, expertise, interests, CV, and publications. ORCID import, where used, provides a faster path for users who already curate their external scholarly identity. HORTUS therefore supports two realistic academic situations: the researcher who wants to synchronize existing data, and the researcher who needs to curate their profile directly within the platform.

The profile editor also makes clear that a scholarly profile in HORTUS is intended to be both professional and usable.

The publications dimension is especially important. An expert profile does not only tell others what a researcher says about themselves; it can also show outputs that support that identity. Publications can be added by DOI import or manually, and ORCID import may refresh them when a curated external record already exists. This gives the profile a stronger academic credibility and makes it more useful for users who want to understand someone’s track record before reaching out. For a doctoral student, that can be useful when identifying possible supervisors, collaborators, or methodological references. For more experienced researchers, it helps assess fit for partnership or project invitations.

Another important feature is expertise endorsement. The available evidence shows that expertise items on a public profile can be endorsed and that endorsements can also be revoked. This gives the Experts area an additional community signal: not only can a person declare their expertise, but the surrounding research community may also recognize it. Endorsement helps transform a profile from a purely self-described identity into a socially reinforced one. In a research environment, this can be especially valuable because it adds lightweight credibility without requiring a formal evaluation process.

The Message action is equally central. Messaging from an expert profile reduces friction in academic contact. After reviewing a profile, the user can move directly into a platform conversation rather than leaving HORTUS to search for an address or compose an external email.

The Favourite / Follow logic adds another level of usefulness. Collaboration does not always begin with an immediate message. Sometimes it starts with a small signal of interest: a person looks relevant, but the contact is for later. By favouriting an expert, the user builds a shortlist of people worth revisiting. By following, where enabled, the user may subscribe to updates around that profile. This makes the Experts area useful not only for immediate contact, but also for slower, relationship-building forms of scholarly awareness.

For a young researcher, the Experts feature can be one of the most attractive parts of HORTUS. It transforms the platform from a set of resources into a visible academic community. It helps answer questions such as: Who is working in this area? Who seems open to collaboration? Which profiles are connected to the projects and resources I am already exploring? Who can I contact without feeling that I am writing into the void? This is a major strength of HORTUS: it makes people discoverable in context, not just content discoverable in isolation.

A good way to think about Experts in HORTUS is this: THE EXPERTS FEATURE IS THE HORTUS’ SCHOLARLY IDENTITY AND CONNECTION LAYER.

It helps researchers find each other, present themselves clearly, and move from visibility to contact and collaboration.

In practical terms, the Experts feature helps the user to:

• browse and search the research community
• identify people by expertise, interests, SSD, and collaboration signals
• evaluate a profile through biography, affiliation, projects, CV, and publications
• favourite or follow profiles for later return
• message relevant experts directly inside the platform
• manage personal visibility and collaboration settings
• build a professional scholarly identity through manual editing or ORCID-supported updating
• export profile data when needed

Taken together, these elements make Experts one of the most human and strategically important features of HORTUS. It is the place where research becomes visible not only as projects and outputs, but as people, competencies, and possible future collaborations.