Placing the IR within the User's Workflow: Connecting Hydra-based Repositories with Zotero

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Project Update

Slides: View the slides from this session here.

Session Description This session presents an update on the research conducted in an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project at Penn State University. The first phase of the project (2012-13) explored the scholarly workflow of the Penn State faculty across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, focusing on the integration of digital technologies at all stages of a research lifecycle—from collecting and analyzing data, over managing and storing research materials, to writing up and sharing research findings. The current phase of the study (2014-2016) centers on developing a digital research tool for humanities scholarship using Zotero as a test platform, in collaboration with George Mason University. Based on the results of the first phase of our study, we will focus on unifying several phases of the research workflow, and facilitating elements such as better integration of finding and archiving into the scholar’s online path. Specifically, we aim to connect Zotero with Penn State’s Hydra-based institutional repository, ScholarSphere. Penn State Zotero users will be able to claim their publications and then seamlessly login and store copies within ScholarSphere. This project aims to place self-archiving within a tool that already has good traction within the Humanities (Zotero), and increase the visibility of an institutional repository within the workflow of digital scholars. Preliminary development as well as additional details on the technology, including options for other Hydra-based repositories to adopt this workflow, will be shared during this research update. We will also discuss specific needs of Humanities scholars as found in the first iteration of this study, and how these implications are addressed in the Zotero / ScholarSphere software integration.

Session Leaders Dawn Childress, Penn State University Patricia Hswe, Penn State University Ellysa Cahoy, Penn State University