This document summarizes findings from interviews with scholars about their personal archiving practices and challenges. Key findings include: 1) Scholars focus on preserving end products like publications rather than research workflows and traces. 2) Lack of training, standards, and support leads to inconsistent and incomplete personal archiving practices. 3) Current reward systems prioritize publications over research processes, influencing what scholars preserve.

1. Scholarly Workflow and
Personal Archiving
Smiljana Antonijević
Penn State University
PDA 2013
University of Maryland
February 21, 2013

3. Project
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded study.
• April, 2012 – June, 2013.
• Methodology:
– web-based survey
– ethnographic interviews
Sciences, humanities, social sciences.

4. Interviews

5. Publications perceived as
longest-lasting contribution.
Thinking about preservation
in terms of end products.

6. ―Philosophy is a book
discipline, and peer-reviewed
articles are still the most canonical
about my work.‖
―I do online tools, I do
iPhones, apps, and I feel, like
everyone in engineering
design, we’re more of an applied
discipline. My most lasting
contribution, of course, is always
going to be papers.‖

7. the most canonical about my w
―I do online tools, I do
iPhones, apps, and I feel, like
everyone in engineering
design, we’re more of an applied
discipline. My most lasting
contribution, of course, is always
going to be papers.‖

8. ―In the narrower sense, kind of the
promotion and tenure sense, it’s the
books and articles. The measurable
stuff, the sort of CV stuff.
But I think that we’re in danger of so
bureaucratizing our evaluation
processes that younger faculty are
driven away from some of the
greatest contributions they could
make because they’re not
immediately measurable in merit
reviews.‖

9. ―This collection of Digital Dialogues I
am creating I see increasingly as a
legacy and a resource.
My strategy for the enhanced digital
book is to think about how to archive
those dialogues; I want people to be
able to listen to them right from the
book.
But it’s not peer-reviewed. So, the way
I get credit for them academically is
how they enrich my traditional
scholarship.‖

10. ―Core is the research trail part, how
do we preserve the research trail, so
that we can see where we went
wrong, or see discovery that we
didn’t notice we were making at the
time, and go back and recover it.
If we obliterated all that, we would
have lost something valuable to
every discipline—disciplinary
knowledge.‖

11. Preservation is a task of
publishers, scholars, and
professional organizations.

12. ―I don’t want the university to
assume the authority to capture
all of my every keystroke and own
it. That seems to me very wrong.
On the other hand, I don’t have
the capacity, particularly
nowadays in the digital age, to
know what to do with all this
material. It’s so much, it’s so
dispersed.
I’ll be gone pretty soon, but the
university has a right to its
memory, it has an obligation to
its memory. ‖

13. Sciences: sharing as
preservation.
“Religious” about
sharing.
Tenure-track faculty tend
to be more territorial.

14. ―Unless there is some obvious
reason to share the data, I don’t
see any benefit in doing so; I
don’t want someone to reanalyze
it and then publish it.
I want them to know as much as
I want to tell them about the
dataset, not enough that they
could make something better or
different.
Even coding, I want to use the
code and take it in a new
direction and earn credit for it.‖

15. Data management
Big problem across disciplines
Inadequate institutional services
Lack of funding
Privacy and sustainability
Fragmentation and accessibility
Curation and annotation

16. ―Every experimenter tends to
do things in their own custom
way, and they tend to develop
tools that are very special to
the purpose of the person who
took the data.
I have the data and can make it
available to you, but is it
organized? Without me there
answering your question
24/7, it is useless to you . ―

17. Need for linked data and linked
practices.
Repository should also have annotation
functions, sharing, personal profile …
"I want [a tool] to get my full research
circle closed, where I can go from
searching through annotation and
everything else to publication.‖
"I use Dropbox for everything. It has
Data saved my life, it has changed my life."
management

18. Scholars’ personal archiving
practices reflect broader issues in
academia.

19. Lack of training
- variety of strategies; confusion
- lack of systematic approach
- expectations of help
- awareness about dire need.

20. Lack of workflow awareness
- attention and effort focused on
end products
- research traces with little
inherent value
- failure of educational systems to
raise awareness about the
importance of one’s workflow.

21. Lack of reward
- current academic system shapes
scholars’ archiving views and
practices through the system of
rewards
- currently, this system almost
exclusively rewards end products
- scholars’ do not necessarily
preserve what they care about
but what they get credit for.

22. Thank you!
www.scholarlyworkflow.org
scholarlywork@psu.edu
#scholarly_work