Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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features. In addition, while participants wanted automatic <strong>in</strong>formation-harvest<strong>in</strong>g tools to be used
aga<strong>in</strong>st digital content to which they wanted access, the use of these tools aga<strong>in</strong>st their own “content”
was considered “problematic.” Most collaborative tools, such as social bookmark<strong>in</strong>g, collaborative
annotation of digital resources, shared document edit<strong>in</strong>g, and “contribut<strong>in</strong>g to the authentication of
digital content,” fell <strong>in</strong> the middle range of desired features. F<strong>in</strong>ally, advanced communication tools
(e.g., real-time chat and video conferenc<strong>in</strong>g) were not considered to be highly valuable, and most
participants were satisfied with exist<strong>in</strong>g systems, such as e-mail.
Although Brown and Greengrass believed that the RePAH project had illustrated that digital resources
were quite important for arts and humanities researchers, their impact on personal archiv<strong>in</strong>g and
publish<strong>in</strong>g practices were still very limited:
… despite its impact on research, ICT has not fed through to the habits and procedures for
personal digital data archiv<strong>in</strong>g, and has not yet had a substantial impact on the means of
scholarly communication <strong>in</strong> the arts and humanities. In short, it has not yet profoundly
<strong>in</strong>fluenced the way <strong>in</strong> which arts and humanities publication is conceived (Brown and
Greengrass 2010).
Similar results were observed by Dalbello et al. (2006), and Brown and Greengrass also confirmed the
f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g of Toms and O’Brien of the solitary scholar work<strong>in</strong>g on a journal article for a pr<strong>in</strong>ted
publication. Additionally, although many scholars wanted greater access to, and quality assurance of,
resources, many distrusted any portal features that either automatically harvested their content (such as
CVs on a research profile page <strong>in</strong> a portal) or monitored their activity (e.g., observ<strong>in</strong>g the electronic
resources they selected from a portal page), even if such features enhanced the performance of the
system for the whole community. This hesitance was caused by a number of reasons, accord<strong>in</strong>g to
Brown and Greengrass, and <strong>in</strong>cluded the “<strong>in</strong>dividualistic nature of the community” and personalprivacy
fears. Such attitudes and other limited technical understand<strong>in</strong>g, Brown and Greengrass
emphasized, however, were important for portal builders to consider <strong>in</strong> any future design:
… the concerns raised here suggest a lack of awareness about the extent to which actions are
already monitored and recorded. When this is coupled with the strongly expressed preference
for simple tools that require little or no learn<strong>in</strong>g and their expressions of frustration at the lack
of sophistication of search eng<strong>in</strong>es (a frustration that was often a function of their lack of
familiarity, or perhaps understand<strong>in</strong>g, of Boolean search parameters permitted <strong>in</strong> Google’s
advanced search facilities), a picture emerges of researchers with relatively limited technical
skills. Our focus group participants reported levels of formal <strong>in</strong>itiation or tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the digital
resources that they used vary<strong>in</strong>g from little to none. The implication here is clearly that future
portal developments should assume only a very basic level of ICT competence (Brown and
Greengrass 2010).
The f<strong>in</strong>al issue raised by Brown and Greengrass was the importance of access, a theme that ran
through all of their results, and this access was primarily to onl<strong>in</strong>e journals. While arts and humanities
researchers do desire more sophisticated research <strong>in</strong>frastructures, Brown and Greengrass concluded,
they mostly want open access to content with simple search eng<strong>in</strong>es that can nonetheless guarantee
quality and relevant results. Portal designers should also assume low levels of IT competence and
provide basic <strong>in</strong>terfaces that can be customized <strong>in</strong> that users can add l<strong>in</strong>ks or feeds to their commonly
used sources. They also ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed that arts and humanities researchers <strong>in</strong> general felt no need for