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Thursday, December 13, 2007
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New Effort Encourages Professors to Share the Research Materials on Their Hard Drives
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Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, wants scholars to stop keeping their research materials to themselves. Just about every academic has notes, photographs, digital scans of research documents, and plenty of other data on their hard drives, he says, but they rarely share anything beyond what makes it into their final books or journal articles. Why not upload such material to a shared online database for other scholars to draw from?
The center announced on Tuesday that it will work with the nonprofit Internet Archive to create just such a database—and to build tools to make it easy for professors to add their personal research files. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $514,000 to the center to support the effort, and gave more than $700,000 to the Internet Archive for the project as well.
"It's pooling together all of these resources that scholars have and putting them in one place where they can be found," said Mr. Cohen, in an interview on Wednesday. He said he hoped the system would be ready by the summer.
The upload tool will be attached to the center's popular Web-browser plug-in, Zotero. That software, which works only with the free Firefox browser, helps scholars organize online research documents, including links to Web sites and online journal articles. Mr. Cohen likes to say that Zotero "is like iTunes for your reference" materials, referring to the popular software by Apple used to organize personal music libraries. The Zotero software has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released last fall, he says.
Copyright is an issue, so the service will prompt users to certify that they have the permission to post the material for all the world to see—either because they are the authors or because the material is no longer covered by copyright.
Previous efforts have tried to spur professors to share their notes and research documents in online archives, but those ventures failed to gather a critical mass. Librarians promoting the use of institutional repositories of journal articles, for instance, have said the databases could be used for research notes, but in many cases officials have had trouble getting professors to share copies of their published journal articles in the databases—much less other material.
Mr. Cohen said the key to his plan was ease of use. Many professors are using the Zotero software already, he said, and uploading materials will require just a few clicks. Adding materials might enhance a scholar's reputation, he noted, because his or her name will remain attached to the contribution. Materials in the archive should be easy enough to find because the Internet Archive, where the materials will be posted, is already popular online.
The Internet Archive is promising an added incentive to get scholars to share. For researchers who upload scanned files of books or other documents, the archive will perform a full-text conversion and e-mail back a text document that can be easily searched (image files of documents are not usually searchable).
Mr. Cohen hopes to use the system to post extensive notes he took while he was researching a book on George Boole, the inventor of Boolean algebra. For that research, he flew to Cork, Ireland, and read every letter written by the mathematics pioneer. "I actually have a hard drive full of stuff," he said.