Penn State Awarded Mellon Grant to Study Personal Scholarly Archiving, Direct Development of Zotero

From Penn St.U.:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $440,000 to Penn State. The two-year project in collaboration with George Mason University will build upon the 2012-13 research led by Ellysa Stern Cahoy, education librarian, studying how faculty managed and archived their scholarly information collections.
Over the next two years, Stern Cahoy, in collaboration with Sean Takats, associate professor of history at George Mason University and director of research projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, will direct software development to enhance how faculty organize and archive information, including their own scholarly publications.
The software development will center on Zotero, an open source citation manager overseen by Takats and commonly used for scholarly research management, storage and bibliographic citation generation. Stern Cahoy, Takats and developers at Penn State and George Mason will enhance Zotero’s archiving capabilities by linking to ScholarSphere, Penn State’s institutional repository service. This will allow Penn State faculty, students and staff to claim and deposit self-authored works securely in ScholarSphere via Zotero.
The software developed in this project will allow other colleges and universities with similar institutional repositories to implement a Zotero deposit connection. The development team also will develop enhancements that, through RSS feeds of scholarly journals, facilitate greater discovery of research articles within Zotero. In the third phase of the project, Stern Cahoy and the research team will repeat their phase-one research methodology to assess how the Zotero optimizations help users in the humanities further unify their research practices, particularly in the areas of personal archiving and information discovery.

Read the Complete Announcement
Direct to Elyssa Stern Cahoy’s Web Page, Publications, and Presentations
Direct to Sean Takats Web Page
See Also: Curating Digital Intellectual Lives by Ellysa Stern Cahoy & Scott McDonald (Penn State University Library)
Presentation at the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving Conference.
See Also: The Challenge of Teaching Personal Archiving
A Guest Post by Elyssa Stern Cohoy on LC’s The Signal Blog
See Also: Mellon Foundation Awards Penn St. University Librarian $143,000 to Study Personal Scholarly Archiving (May 15, 2012)

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