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Virtual Knowledge Studio Collaboratory; Understanding Scholarly Collaboration in Practice
Focus Areas
Status: Completed
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Aim
This project builds on the results of the 2007 SURFshare project Virtual Knowledge Studio Collaboratory: Linking Scholarly Networks and Disciplines. The latter project involved setting up an online collaboratory so that researchers at the three VK studios in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Maastricht could collaborate. This follow-up project brought the environment to maturity and investigated how collaboration works in actual practice. The researchers concerned are all carrying out e research in the social sciences and humanities.
Results
The project generated results in four areas:
1. Technical development: giving further shape to the existing VKS collaboratory. Amongst other things, this involves a link between the collaboratory and RePub, the institutional repository at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
2. Support: the support provided when using a collaboratory was extended by adding an introductory course. Instruction materials such as “webinars” and instruction films were also provided.
3. Research: sociological research was carried out on the ways in which researchers apply and experience online collaboration. A number of papers and articles were published on this topic.
4. Application: an application was developed to enhance thesauruses and ontologies in the humanities and social sciences. This took the form of a central collaboration environment for validating and defining new concepts.
The collaboratories made use of SURFgroepen/SharePoint. For online collaboration, the researchers can utilise numerous functions, including document libraries, a calendar, blogs, wikis, action lists, a reference management tool, and a link to RePub (the repository at Erasmus University Rotterdam). By no means all of these functions are actually utilised, however. The collaboratories are mainly used for organising conferences and meetings and for sharing documents.
Whether collaboration is successful depends on personal skills, experience, preferences, and routines. The culture of the academic discipline concerned is only a minor determining factor as regards the manner of collaboration. Good technical support, an inspiring project coordinator, or the obligation to utilise a collaboratory all make a major contribution to success.
The technology may be a problem in online collaboration, particularly if the selected technology is insufficiently transparent and flexible.
Future
The VKS intends offering a course module in “Online Scholarly Collaboration” in combination with a module on scholarly publication and Open Access. A “starter’s kit” will also be developed to help set up and utilise a collaboratory. A workshop will also be arranged for starters, with hands-on training.
The experience gained during this project will also be utilised during the Master’s degree seminar on “New Media and Society” at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, March-June 2010.