information science
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT Preserving Researchers’ Working Notes with Linked Open Data BY KIMBERLY HII
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fter researchers complete projects, the notes they make during the research process are often discarded. To preserve the research value in these working notes, as well as enable researchers to collaborate across related projects, researchers developed an open-source system for organizing and storing these notes called Editors’ Notes. Dr. Ryan Shaw, a professor at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill who helped develop Editors’ Notes, describes the system as a “web-based research environment in which researchers Dr. Ryan Shaw are able to track their own work and share research between projects.”1 Researchers in the humanities deal extensively with primary sources such as personal documentation, diaries, speeches and letters. Information from these sources is collected, annotated and organized in working notes, which are written and consulted extensively at every step of the research process. “The majority of the research produced by [documentary] editors and their assistants is represented by the working notes they develop to answer questions raised by their documents,”2 writes the development team of Editors’ Notes. “But it is very likely that the working note contains a variety of useful information that will not appear in the published footnote due to either lack of space or unresolved issues with the information.”2 The extensive documentation and substantial research work which comprise working notes also may not survive past
the completion of the publication for which the working notes were made. The development team writes that “[t]he majority of the research produced by editorial projects is not included in the published volumes, is not shared with other researchers, and is discarded when grants for publication expire.”2 The Editors’ Notes development team recognized the value of preserving these working notes for future access, as well as the potential for collaboration across related projects through sharing these working notes between researchers. Created as a tool to support documentary editing, Editors’ Notes also enables editors to sort, filter and visualize data, as well as cross-reference between sources and notes (Figure
Figure 1. Part of the Editors’ Notes data model. Illustrates conceptual links between the research topic, historical documents used in research, and working notes made during research. Image courtesy of Dr. Shaw.
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