At the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving conference, Scott McDonald and I presented our model for managing faculty's digital intellectual workflow. (see below)
The model to the left (also included in the presentation linked above) envisions the ideal faculty workflow, in which articles, books and other resources are seamlessly found, collected, used, cited and shared, with the resulting work archived within an institutional repository. Scott and I envision a system that would allow the user to do these essential functions within one interface. Searching. storing, citing, and archiving would all happen in an easy flow for the researcher, and faculty would be encouraged to archive their published materials throughout their intellectual careers, instead of at the end of their academic tenure and lives (as happens most frequently today.)
At the conference, Scott and I were very lucky to meet Ed Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and an Emeritus Professor of Computer Sciences at Stanford University. Ed is collaborating with Stanford archivists to create SALT (Self Archiving Legacy Toolkit). SALT provides an interface for emeritus faculty to interact with their published research and other archival materials. As SALT's faculty test case, Ed can login to SALT and annotate, narrate, and organize his materials as he chooses. Relevant researchers studying Ed also have access to the archive, as do the University archivists.
SALT is an amazing step forward in making archiving of personal research collections a more dynamic, two way process. Ed, Scott and I discussed a next step for a tool like SALT, to use the interface as a jumping off point for a resource that provides all of the search, organization and citation needs that current researchers have, while also building in opportunities for the mid-career researcher to archive materials within an institutional repository throughout their academic careers. This is a more proactive approach to archiving and possibly also a way to get more current faculty to connect with and actively use institutional repositories on a more regular basis.
I am hopeful that Scott, Ed and I, along with our Penn State and Stanford partners can make this idea a reality.
Ellysa and Scott: This is a very important project and your vision is compelling. As you know, I have been thinking about this on my blog as well: http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/TheLongRoad/digital-research/ Your initiative fits well with my strategy to focus on the affordances technology offers for faculty research. My sense is that if we can show faculty how technology can be used to facilitate their research productivity, we will have more success in having faculty adopt forward thinking uses of technology in their teaching. I would be happy to participate in this project in whatever way I can, and I hope we will be able to bring our teaching and learning with technology initiatives in the Liberal Arts into close collaboration with your work.
It occurs to me that the model diagrammed above is really the model of the web, and aligns specifically with the "architecture of participation" outlined by Tim O'Reilly. Perhaps the missing piece to the equation is that so many scholarly works don't follow the natural laws of the web. For example, many scholarly works don't have a URL, are obscured behind some kind of login system, and are published in rigid, hard to work with formats, like PDF.
You two exemplify what I love about PSU - smart people that are already thinking about what I am, and are ready to engage. I think there is an opportunity for us to really lead in this space right now. We have the tech infrastructure thanks to folks like Brad and his colleagues at ETS, and there is the intellectual infrastructure as evidenced by folks like Chris. It is a good time to be a Nittany Lion, and I am not just saying that.