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Today’s researchers have access to more information than ever before. Yet the new material is both overwhelming in quantity and variable in quality. How can scholars survive these twin problems and produce groundbreaking research using the physical and electronic resources available in the modern university research library? In Digital Paper, Andrew Abbott provides some much-needed answers to that question. This book is a very good start to organizing research with documents/artifacts found online or in a library. In fact, I think this is a good follow up reading to _Still Life with Rhetoric_ by Gries. While Abbott may feel otherwise, Gries offers a much more close textual case of how to do this kind of research while implying more general applications. What this book does instead is offer a strongly historically library studies focus to research. This book is a little more dogmatic about the language structures and tools of library studies research projects. It is not bad at explaining library well, but in doing so and in assuming a lot (incorrectly) about the differences between library research and general social science, this book rhetorically attempts to alienate a lot of people who could find value in it. You actively have to read this with an eye for arguing against the dogma if you are not a library scholar. The responsibilities involved in digital curation can be shared across different institutions and communities and change over the life-cycle of the data, often incorporating organisational and cultural issues as well as technical ones. There is often confusion surrounding the specific roles that various stakeholders play in the digital curation life-cycle. As such, disambiguation is urgently required. Different disciplines use terminology in different ways which can lead to inconsistencies and/or misunderstandings between collaborators on digital curation.
Digital curation is an ongoing process not a one-off action. It is a chain of activities only as strong as its weakest link. It is necessary to have the appropriate financial and policy infrastructures in place to ensure that digital curation itself can be continued over the long-term. Digital curation can be costly and requires a significant level of time investment and expertise. This can be problematic for smaller institutions, especially as the major advantages of digital curation are long-term and investment can take many years to bear fruit. But for seasoned researchers, the book is also (as I said above) life-affirming. Easily my favorite chapter is the second, which provides an autobiographical account of the research that went into Abbott’s paper “Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century”. I had read this paper — which is superb — before reading Digital Paepr. Reading the story of how “Library Research” was produced was absolutely fascinating. In fact, I think if you just assigned the “Library Research Infrastructure” paper and chapter 2 of Digital Paper to students, you’d have a pretty good sense of Abott’s wider project. The use of tools and services to migrate data, metadata, and other representation information into new formats to ensure it remains meaningful to usersAll activities involved in managing data from planning its creation, best practice in digitisation and documentation, and ensuring its availability and suitability for discovery and re-use in the future are part of digital curation. Digital curation can also include managing vast data sets for daily use, for example ensuring that they can be searched and continue to be readable. Digital curation is therefore applicable to a large range of professional situations from the beginning of the information life-cycle to the end; digitisers, metadata creators, funders, policy-makers, and repository managers to name a few examples. Ensuring data is valid as a formal record where appropriate, meaning it can function into the future as legal evidence There is no knowledge revolution—just a new level of overload, a lot of churning, and a lot of hype. M. Atkinson, M. P., Britton, D., Coveney, P., De Roure, D. E., Garnett, N., Geddes, N., Gurney, R., Ingram, D., Haines, K., Hughes, L., Jeffreys, P., Lyon, L. J., Osborne, I., Perrott, R., Procter, R. N. and Trefethen, A. E. (March 2008). " Century-of-Information Research — a Strategy for Research and Innovation in the Century of Information" (CIR3).
Improved speed and range of access, data sharing and analysis opportunities, and other research benefits There is an ever-increasing amount of data being created in digital formats, through the digitisation of existing analogue information and the creation of new 'born-digital' data from the sciences, arts, and humanities sectors. As well as generating new digital data, scientists, researchers, and scholars have begun to rely on digital content created by others. These data are at risk from technological obsolescence and from the inherent fragility of digital media. Digital curation is the management and preservation of digital data over the long-term. But then I slowly realized that over the years, my library of PDFs had basically turned into a noisy intranet of its own and that my reading notes, although well organized, were ramifying out of control. So for my last article — on the influence of population biology on the thought of Jared Diamond — I tried Abbott’s approach of having a separate database for every file.
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On the one hand, Abbott makes a very abstract argument about how library research (and actually all research) works: It is ‘nonlinear’. By this he means that other manuals on how to do research are wrong: You don’t start with a lit review, then take notes, and then write up your paper. Rather, people are always already multitasking — as we spend time in the library or on the Internet we are silently engaging in all of these ‘stages’ of research simultaneously. As these processes cycle over and over, we feed them with material that sparks new ideas. As Abbott puts it, “serendipity is not an unusual, once-in-a-lifetime, even once-in-a-project thing. It is the one constant factor in library research.” urn:lcp:digitalpapermanu0000abbo:epub:5c75eed7-d2f8-4946-b9ee-b44b56669c13 Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4081 Identifier digitalpapermanu0000abbo Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6652dz7p Invoice 1605 Isbn 9780226167640
Exploiting initial investment by ensuring that data is available for use and re-use and protecting the financial value of information Mechanisms for quality control, authentication, and validation of data should form part of digital curation. That said, the author claims to be fairly general, and claims serious nonlinearity is important to the library approach (and that this is fairly non-existent in social science literature methodologies... which is total nonsense), social and anthropological approaches such as trace ethnography, Actor-Network studies, and to some extent, Social Network Analysis very explicitly does this more radically than this book suggests that makes this approach unique to that of a "librarian" scholar. In addition, anyone who has done supervised machine learning would outright laugh at how linear this approach appears to them.
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One of the major advantages of making digital data widely available is that it can be searched, however studies have shown that much data available online is not used due to the difficulties users have in locating datasets and searching within them. How can data from diverse, varied collections be meaningfully combined to provide faster, more accurate searching, and new research findings? The ownership of digital data is particularly complex as creators of both digital objects and analogue originals, databases, metadata, tools for functionality and contextual information can all have rights over the materials, as can the digital curators themselves. Managing rights is a challenging and time-consuming aspect of digital curation. M. Atkinson, M. P., Britton, D., Coveney, P., De Roure, D. E., Garnett, N., Geddes, N., Gurney, R., Ingram, D., Haines, K., Hughes, L., Jeffreys, P., Lyon, L. J., Osborne, I., Perrott, R., Procter, R. N. and Trefethen, A. E. (March 2008). " Century-of-Information Research — a Strategy for Research and Innovation in the Century of Information" (CIR3).
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