From Writing and Analysis to the Repository: Taking the Scholar’s

Perspective on Scholarly Archiving

Catherine C. Marshall

Akshay Kulkarni

Overview

Explores practices associated with◦ Collaborative Authoring◦ Reference Use◦ Informal Creation of Personal Archives

Study Description

In this paper, the author discusses findings in four areas:◦ (1) Collaboration and writing◦ (2) File storage and management◦ (3) Maintaining and extending bibliographic

resources◦ (4) Personal archiving of scholarly material.

Disciplines considered

Discipline Number of participants

Algorithms and Theory 3

Distributed Systems 10

Security and Privacy 5

Software Tools 3

Web Search and Data Mining

3

Observation Methodology Observations over 6 months. Interviews of 45 minutes to one hour. Participants in different phases of their

careers. Some professional participants along with

academic participants. All participants published regularly. Collected relevant data such as Web-based

publication list, cirricula vitae etc.

Findings

1. Collaboration and Writing Roles in writing

◦ Co-ordinate writing by parceling out sections◦ Write entire draft by themselves and not cede

the text to co-authors until fully formed◦ Participants in same place write shoulder-to-

shoulder in front of a display◦ If not in same location then synchronous

collaboration.◦ Sections split according to skill.◦ Final co-author just reviews work and results but

does not have access to data-sets.

Findings

1. Collaboration and Writing Places and Devices

◦ Noise, display size, firewalls, presence of colleagues – all these factors affect where participants write.Examples: Academic office, corporate office, conferences etc.

◦ Similarly different computers are used for different activitiesExamples: Number crunchers, email machines, backup hosts etc.

Findings

1. Collaboration and Writing Tools

1. Editors, figure generating tools, document preparation software (LaTeX)

2. Analysis software to process data3. Infrastructure software such as email4. Custom software used specifically to produce

specific results for the paper.

2. Storing and Managing Materails Versioning

Participants use sophisticated versioning systems to:

1. Compare successive revisions2. Merge two conflicting versions3. Create personal backups4. Create meaningful checkpoints in the lifecycle5. Record development of ideas

Findings

2. Storing and Managing Materails Managing Data

1. For 9 out of 14 participants creating, gathering, analyzing and presenting data was a fundamental part of research.

2. For small datasets different ways are used to store data such as CSV files, descriptive metadata files, logs and transcripts in emails, Microsoft OneNote

3. Large datasets have a lifecycle of their own. They may not be backed up, let alone archived.

Findings

3. Bibliographic Resources Maintaining local resources

◦ Participants often cited LaTeX’s bibliographic capability – BibTex to prepare publications.

◦ Participants build them over time and use them for intellectual bookkeeping.

◦ Participants extend citations with comments, summaries, notes, tags or abstracts to help remember.

◦ Inherit previous bib files for projects on the same topic.

Findings

3. Bibliographic Resources Non-traditional resources

◦ Participants consider CiteSeer as a useful resource for doing citation following.

◦ Participants use Google to get exact citation and then go to digital libraries to get the paper.

◦ Online resources are considered based on Coverage Authority Scope Timeliness

Findings

4. Personal Archiving Contents of a personal archive

◦ Personal archiving is a side effect of collaboration and publication.

◦ Efforts to maintain intellectual legacy: Paper sources and alternate versions PDFs of published versions Research code Data, logs and scripts Bibliographies and publications of related work Emails

Findings

4. Personal Archiving How materials are stored

◦ Bundle related files together.◦ Establish temporal order and intellectual context.◦ Easily maintainable

◦ Email is cited as a good permanent store because: Easy to browse chronologically Intrinsic metadata to reconstruct data Accessible easily from anywhere

◦ Zipping up files is another established archiving technique.

Findings

Implications for Collaborative Information Management (CIM):

1. Bundle together heterogeneous files, datasets and other items.

2. Support reference replica.3. Support email like documentation and

chronological organization.4. Support collections including data sets too large

to be copied.5. Support synchronization when co-authors

straddle an institutional firewall.

Conclusions

Implications for personal scholarly archives◦ Archives must be able to be disentangled when

the scholar changes affiliation.◦ A master bibliography is important.◦ Answer the question whether all the resources

involved are archival? For example intermediate data sets are not archived.

Conclusions

Implications for institutional and disciplinary repositories◦ Reduce the overhead of how the researcher send

data to publisher as well as other institutional repositories.

◦ Repository quality should be improved without adding great deal of unwanted overhead.

Conclusions