December 12, 2007
New Effort Encourages Professors to Share the Research Materials on Their Hard Drives
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 yesterday 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 more 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 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 plug-in software 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,” 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.
Previous efforts have tried to spur professors to share their notes and research documents in online archives, but they have failed to gather a critical mass. Librarians promoting the use of institutional repositories of journal articles, for instance, have mused aloud that 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 that the key to his plan was ease of use. Many professors are using the Zotero software already, he said, and the upload will take place with just a few clicks. Plus, adding materials might enhance a scholar’s reputation, since his or her name will remain attached to the contribution. Materials in the archive should be easy enough to find, since the Internet Archive, where the materials will be posted, is already popular online.
The Internet Archive is also promising an added incentive to make scholars 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 (picture 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. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday December 12, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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Focusing on “ease of use” and providing incentives are great ideas. I’d also emphasize getting grad students and other young scholars involved.
— S. Britchky Dec 12, 04:14 PM #
Yes, getting grad students to adopt Zotero will be key. Established scholars are less likely to change their work habits.
— Bill Sodeman Dec 12, 05:04 PM #
Established scholars can play a very important role- by embracing this kind of system, they set an example for their peers and others.
— Sarah Whitcher Kansa Dec 13, 01:25 AM #
Is there a typo in the title? Should “the” be “their”?
— CP Dec 13, 10:21 AM #
Bibliography – no software (open source) easy (off line).
Why?
— Pilliphe Dec 18, 05:31 AM #