Set Institutional and Personal Vita Template Information and Settings
This article walks users through configuring both institutional and personal vita templates in Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR). It covers how to:
- Set up template information and display settings, including section order, visibility, and styling.
- Use features like section duplication, grouping, and table formatting to organize vita content.
- Access and download the editing history for transparency and version tracking.
- Customize citation styles, headings, and paragraph formatting to align with institutional standards.
- Control visibility of empty sections/groups, attachments, and publicly displayed activities.
- Enable automatic vita sharing with faculty, streamlining access and reducing manual distribution.
Whether you're an administrator setting up institutional vita templates or a faculty member customizing personal vita templates, this article provides the tools and guidance to create professional, structured vitas that reflect your academic contributions.
Edit Vita Template
Navigate to a personal vita template under ‘My Templates’ or an institutional vita template under Administration > Setup > Institutional Vita Template and select the desired template name from the list of all templates to navigate to the template's page.
Edit Template Settings
Template settings are basic settings that can be applied to the entire template, including the template name and description, and display settings (such as including the name/description on the vita, if empty sections should be shown, etc.).
From the ‘Edit Template’ dropdown, select Edit Template Settings to update the name, description, and display settings.
Display Settings
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Show Empty Sections: Display sections with no data on the generated vita.
Note that turning this on could create empty space on a vita generated from the template.
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Show Empty Groups: Include empty groups in the CV to maintain structure, even if no data is present.
You can view how a section is grouped by selecting the ‘Section Grouping’ option while editing that section.
- Display Links to Attachments: Toggle attachment visibility per section.
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Show ALL activities, even if 'Publicly Displayed' option is set to ‘No’: Show all activities in the vita, even those hidden from public profiles.
This should only be on if the institution has opted for Publicly Displayed activity classification for faculty web profiles. This toggle allows faculty to exclude activities from their public profile while including them in their vita.
- Autogenerate Vita for Faculty: Institutional Administrators in FAR now have the ability to indicate whether to share vitas with faculty. If ‘Show to faculty’ is selected, the vita will automatically appear as a link on the list of institutional vitas to which the faculty have access.
Edit Template Styling
Adjust styling options such as font family, font size, font color, text alignment, and spacing. These options can be applied to Titles, Headings, and Paragraph text, and when done from Template Styling, will apply to all sections of the template. Individual section styling will override the template-level styling.
- Select Edit Template Styling from the ‘Edit Template’ dropdown to customize citation style and formatting.
- On the 'Edit Template Styling' window you can edit the Citation Style and formatting for Titles, Headings, and Paragraphs. These changes will be applied to the template and will define the styles for all vitas created with it.
| Title | Headings | Paragraph |
|---|---|---|
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This styling applies to the faculty information at the top of the vita (ex., their name, honorific, etc.)
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This styling applies to the sub-titles within a section, and is determined by Section Groupings (done in section-level configuration)
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Paragraph styling applies to the individual records/activities within each section.
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Click View Editing History (if available) to see a log of changes within a specified date range. The ‘Edit History Report’ includes the Date & Time the change was made, which User made the change, and the number of edits that were made. You can also expand the section to see a detailed list of the changes made.
Edit Vita Sections
While some configurations are made at the template-level, and apply across all sections, others can be made to a specific section.
| Options available for all sections |
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|---|---|
| Options available for all activity sections (may be excluded from some profile sections) |
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| Special options available for select default sections |
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If configurations can be made at both the template-level and section-level (such as styling options like font, font size, etc.), the section-level configurations will take priority.
Click Edit (pencil) next to the desired section name to make additional styling decisions specific to each section.
Settings
All sections have the Section Settings option, which includes configurations for the section name/description, the display style for the section, and more. Depending on the selected section, different options will appear under the Settings tab.
Check out this article Overview of Vita Display Styles for more details on the available ‘Display Style’ options when formatting a vita.
Section Grouping
Section Grouping is available for all activity sections and some profile sections. This allows records to be categorized within a section, up to 4 levels. This grouping is what determines “Heading” settings in Styling.
- Section Name = Heading 1
- First group = Heading 2
- Second group = Heading 3
- Third group = Heading 4
- Fourth group = Heading 5
Sections can be grouped by activity classifications or designated database fields such as city, degree, discipline, and more.
Grants have the added ability to group activities by Status, while Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions can also be grouped by Subtype and Status.
Multiple groupings creates essentially a categorical hierarchy of data within a section and can be done by Activity Classification or Field. For example, we might set our first grouping to be the field Start Term. This would create sub-groupings within the selected section, categorized by matching start terms. And example can be seen below:
| Setting Configuration | Vita Display |
|---|---|
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If we wanted to then further group our data, we could select to group next by the field Organization. This will create new groupings within our existing grouping of Start Term, categorized by matching Organizations, as can be seen in the example below:
| Setting Configuration | Vita Display |
|---|---|
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This could be done up to twice more (for a total of four groupings).
Activity Classification
The Activity Classification configuration option is only available for Activity records (not profile records). This setting determines which activity classifications (ACs) show with the activity record, and in which order.
This does not organize activities by AC; it appends the AC information at the end of the record on the vita.
| Example of Activity Classification (shown in Traditional-Date format) |
Example of Activity Classification (with ACs shown) |
|---|---|
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Styling
All sections have the Styling option. Styling configuration options at the section-level are the same as those at the template-level, but only apply to the select section.
