Scholars Workbench Solution Community
Mission
In the undertaking of scholarship and research there are many tools that can be used to support the scholar, be they experimental systems to support scientific disciplines or resource systems to support arts and humanities access to materials. At the heart of all scholarship is information, and the need to manage it for specific uses. This information may previously exist, as much historical content does, or it may be generated as part of the scholarship: it may be used to inform research, and it is likely to be at the centre of the resulting outputs.
The Scholar's (or Scholars'? - discuss!) Workbench Solution Community is being established to undertake its own scholarship in this area. It will gather existing information on how scholars use and generate information, and how they manage it, capturing experience that can be shared. It will specifically examine how digital repositories can support the management of information in the support of all aspects of scholarship. Repositories could be the core systems used, or they could underpin the use of other systems through integration with research-specific tools. How can the tools used for scholarship and research be repository-aware, and vice versa?
The wiki page here will be used to share findings from the Community, and identify gaps that need addressing. The vision of this Solution Community is to develop and disseminate an understanding of the place of repositories in facilitating scholarship: this will guide work towards implementation through collaborative efforts and identify both common and specific ways in which repositories can serve scholarship for the future.
The Community
Chris Awre (University of Hull), Tobias Blanke (King's College, London) and Mark Hedges (King's College, London) are acting as stewards for this community. We really encourage people with an interest in this area to get in touch with us so that we can start to build up some concrete information about what is going on in this area and so that we can all share the knowledge and benefit from it.
To that end we invite you to submit a page of information about what you are doing in the 'scholars workbench' arena to get us going. If you have an editing account for this wiki, please add a page below under 'Community Members', or you may prefer to send the text to Richard Green who will add it for you; he is acting as the community's 'knowledge gardner' for the moment.
The Community was formally launched at the Open Repositories 2009 conference (May 2009).
There is a mailing list for this Solutions Community to which you can subscribe here.
Community members
The Hydra Project (Universities of Hull and Virginia, Stanford University, Fedora Commons)
RepoMMan and REMAP Projects (University of Hull. UK)
Spoken Word Services (Glasgow Caledonian University)
Other work in the Scholars Workbench field
We are aware of a number of other projects working in the Scholars Workbench field that we hope will join this Community when they hear about it:
eSciDoc (FIZ Karlsruhe and the Max Planck Society) is an e-Research environment consisting of three parts: the eSciDoc Infrastructure (including Fedora), a set of services, and eSciDoc Solutions built on top of the eSciDoc Infrastructure and some of the services. Most interesting for scholars will probably the solutions ViRR (an authoring environment for digital editions of scanned materials) and Faces (a generic image solution with the aibility to create arbitrary albums out of image collections). Most of the services can be re-used independently of the eSciDoc Infrastructure and the eSciDoc Solutions.
Islandora (University of Prince Edward Island) - Islandora is the basis of a number of projects: the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) provides a diverse set of collaborative and repository tools for academics VRE; ResearchSpaces is a pending proposal to Digging Into Data to build a "Scholars Workbench tool for the Humanities. Islandora provides the glue that binds Drupal and Fedora into a highly flexible and easily customizable environment for digital collections and scholarly activities. Islandora is hosted at the Fedora Commons.
