Taking the Scholars' Perspective on Scholarly Archiving

About a year ago, I undertook a qualitative field study of the scholarly writing, collaboration, information management, and long-term archiving practices of researchers in five related subdisciplines. Fifteen generous participants allowed me to interview them about the kinds of artifacts they create in the process of writing a paper, how they exchange and store materials over the short term, how they handle references and bibliographic resources, and the strategies they use to guarantee the long term safety of their scholarly materials. The findings revealed some surprising design implications for collaboration infrastructure and personal scholarly archives in addition to suggesting some ways to facilitate the deposit of scholarly materials into institutional and disciplinary repositories.

What did I learn? Come find out!