Envisioning the Scholar’s Workspace:
Tools to Gather, Create, Share
David A. Greenbaum, Director
Interactive University Project
Museum Informatics Project
Information Systems and Technology, UC Berkeley
My Question
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What tools should we develop so that the
campus community can best use digital
content to advance scholarship?
Waters Test: “How does the system (service)
advance scholarship?”
By scholar, I mean three roles: the scholar as
researcher, the scholar as teacher, and the
scholar as democratizer of knowledge… and,
as possible, the integration of the three
Today
1. Sketch a framework for thinking about
tools
2. Show a prototype tool we are
developing: “Scholar’s Box”
 Caveat: scratches and too much
 Acknowledge and build on support of
others: funders, staff, colleagues
Who I am
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Interactive University Project: Use information
technology to help the Berkeley campus
share its knowledge and content with higher
education and the public.
Museum Informatics Project: Support digital
collections in museums, libraries, faculty.
Information Systems and Technology Division
Merging these groups …. Around a focus on
sharing of digital content and collections?
Frameworks for thinking about
Scholar’s Workspace
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Much churning and change….
A number of tools/services coming from
a range of different places
Very important social and technical
issues to consider. Some ways to think
about this without over-simplification
FACULTY
STUDENT
STAFF
PUBLIC
USERS
USER EXPERIENCE
Course
Management
TOOLS
Weblog
Citation
Manager
Office Suites
…ETC
EXPOSE/ACCESS
REPOSITORIES
PUBLISHER
…ETC
DIGITAL
LIBRARY
LEARNING INSTITUTIONAL
OBJECTS
The Future of Ideas: From
music …
“Rip. Mix. Burn. Apple, of course, wants to sell computers.
Yet its ad touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history.
For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could
enable this generation to do with our culture what
generations have done from the very beginning of human
society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it - meaning to
copy it; to "mix" it - meaning to reform it however the user
wants; and finally, and most important, "burn" it - to publish
it in a way that others can see and hear. Digital technology
could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to
become part of a creative process." Lawrence Lessig, The
Future of Ideas
Gather.
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Create.
Share.
Imagine an environment---an (ideal) “Scholar’s
Workspace”---in which one could build and share
personal collections with access to any data source,
handle any object type, and apply any service to
these objects.
Such tool/service would be highly valuable for higher
education, esp. as it helps to realize “scholarly
primitives” of collecting, organizing, annotating,
interpreting, presenting digital objects.
But it would also serve as key tool for the creation of
digital collections contextualized for different publics
and designed for disaggregation and re-use.
Free Culture: Needs Preservation, Property,
Provenance, and Practices of Acknowledgement
“ Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for
free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and
even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture
without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get
paid. A culture without property … is anarchy, not freedom.
Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture
that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and
control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property.
It is filled with rules of property and contract…. But just as a
free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too
can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property
rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today.
It is against that extremism that this book is written.” –
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
Gather.
Sources
Create.
Share.
Scholar’s Box Tool and Products
Destinations
PowerPoint
Digital Libraries
Web-based
Exhibition
Reading and
Resource
Lists
Museums
Digital Libraries
and Museums
(e.g., CDL)
Learning Object
Repositories
Flash X
Learning Object
Repositories
Scholar's Box
Personal and
Themed Collections
Metadata
Harvesting/
Metasearch
WWW
Small Learning
Objects
Endnote, etc.
Word and OO Text:
Object-Embedded
Narratives
Weblogs / RSS
METs + IMS
Objects
Materials from
Personal
collections
Other Scholarly
Formats
Authoring Tools:
- Powerpoint
- Word
- Weblogs
LMS
Environments
- Sakai
Personal / Group
Collection
Services:
- Chandler
- Lionshare
UCB Scholar’s Box
Domains to bring together
Where, How, Who?
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Where to build these services: digital
repositories, Sakai, Chandler, Browser
Extensions, Google, Microsoft….
Build this as part of the enterprise
cyberinfrastructure for the campus?
A consortial, open source model?
Services that are available to the public and
to other educational, museum, library, and
civic institutions….
Institutional
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Over time, add the well defined pieces of
cyberinfrastructure to the enterprise IT/Library
organizations.
For these enterprise services, find ways to charge
and subsidize --- don’t make it free, but make it too
cheap to roll your own
Less decentralization
Get the big players---e.g., Microsoft, Google---to add
services…
Open source will need major community support
strategies
Human
Invest in people who:
 Span cultures of IT, Library, educational technology,
social software, and disciplines
 Assess and design for different use cases and
scholarly primitives …
 Strategic technologists/architects who can make good
bets about what tools/services will win
 Leadership programs
 Individuals who can bring together key
representatives of the public with higher education to
help build public learning collections
For more information
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Interactive University Project:
http://iu.berkeley.edu
dag@berkeley.edu