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About Harvard Link

Link provides Harvard faculty, staff, and students with personalized information to allow them to connect with and understand the Harvard community.

The ability to explore events, news, people, organizations, and channels is available to the public as well.


Link is a web dashboard that provides faculty, staff, and students with personalized suggestions on Harvard events, news, colleagues, organizations, and courses connected to their interests. Link collects Harvard-related data from a variety of sources and uses text mining to provide users with recommendations related to their interests. Link's database of Harvard events, news, people, and organizations is also searchable, which means users now have a way to quickly find specific things around Harvard. Over time, new data sources and recommendations will be integrated into Link.

For more information on Link, including video walkthroughs, how-to guides, use cases, and shareable overview documents, please visit the project overview site.

How We Built It

Link brings together data from a variety of sources, including the Syllabus Explorer project, faculty and student websites, HUIT's Operational Data Store and PeopleSoft data. The application is secured by HarvardKey. Link is a personalized complement to publicly-available resources like Catalyst.

Link is developed by VPAL-Research (led by Dustin Tingley, Professor of Government and Deputy Vice Provost For Advances In Learning), in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, HUIT, and the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development & Diversity. In addition, countless faculty and staff across the University have contributed to Link by helping the team navigate and build the complex data infrastructure upon which Link is built. Aspects of Link draw inspiration from earlier projects like Catalyst.