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 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 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 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

FACULTYSTUDENTSTAFFPUBLIC USER EXPERIENCE EXPOSE/ACCESS PUBLISHER DIGITAL LIBRARY LEARNING OBJECTS INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES …ETC TOOLS Course Management Weblog Citation Manager Office Suites …ETC USERS

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. 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. Create. Share.

UCB Scholar’s Box

Domains to bring together

Where, How, Who? 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 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

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