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Tales of the Revolt Collaboratory: Sharing, Enhancing, and Disseminating Sources
Scholarly Communication - SURFshare Tenders
Status: Completed
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Aim
The project developed and implemented a collaboratory – i.e. a “virtual research environment” – for the purposes of the Tales of the Revolt research programme (Leiden University). The collaboratory was also tested by users.
The Tales of the Revolt research programme involves collaboration in studying the historiography of the 'Eighty Years' War on the basis of personal and collective recollections. The programme deals with large quantities of data and a variety of types of information sources. These are stored in various locations and are often unstructured. In order to be able to cooperate in working with this material, regardless of the location, an online collaboratory was needed. Experimentation with such a collaboratory took place in the context of SURFshare.
Results
Based on the wishes of the researchers, an analysis was made of the requirements for the functions of the collaboratory. A collaboratory was developed in SharePoint.
Amongst other things, the collaboratory facilitates collaboration in the field of data management and knowledge sharing between the scholars involved and between the research group and libraries and archives. Integrated functions are provided for the storage of data (for example photos), reference management, a discussion forum, a weblog, “to do” lists, and a shared calendar. The collaboratory also promotes interaction between the research programme and the public. The collaboratory enhances the existing Revolt of the Netherlands website (http://dutchrevolt.leidenuniv.nl) with new sources, thus allowing research results to be made available immediately for the general public. The researchers find this functionality valuable and already wish to publicise the results of their research on the public website.
The collaboratory runs on a customised version of SharePoint. With a view to providing researchers with further facilities for online collaboration, the project investigated whether Microsoft’s SharePoint-based Research Information Centre can be used.
Future
The collaboratory will be continued. Leiden University will make these “virtual research environments” available as a service for collaborating researchers.
Implementation of the Research Information Centre software will be investigated further in the near future.