An Open Approach to Scholarly Reading and Knowledge Management

While our research has been driven by particular interest is in developing a networked, web-based reading platform (with HTML as the base format), it is clear that PDF is currently the preferred digital format for many scholarly readers, largely because of two factors: portability and searchability.

Another respondent noted that they use a “combination of apps which have varying degrees of features and accessibility—Zotero, Onenote, Foxit, Docear, Qiqqa.”

This lack of separation between reading and writing is unique to scholarly reading, making it very different from leisure reading. One of our interviewees explained the reason for this inseparability between reading and writing:

Inequities in access to content are further evident in the case of scholars who are affiliated with universities that have less comprehensive access to resources. They must resort to paying exorbitant rates to access content. In many cases, these scholars will contact their peers with institutional access to “restricted” materials behind paywalls, and request a copy. For those academics who are unable to access materials critical to a research project, the effect can be detrimental to their careers.

As a result, scholars in particular disciplines have resorted to sharing materials, such as manuscripts, letters, and photos of archived texts, in private groups. They are wary of copyright infringement but keen to help their peers.

The digital environment can be dynamic, flexible, and connected, not siloed and restricted, and so too could digital scholarly reading.

think if you’re looking at text as a dataset, it’s about, ‘How do you visualize? How do you enable an integration for visualization or re-combination?’… This is how I read, and the digital environment doesn’t allow me to underline and tag and mark up, and then also export text into a note tool or any of those things.”

Scholarly reading involves not only making annotations, underlining, highlighting, and adding other marginalia, but also being able to flip back and forward within a text, or break it apart, comparing and rearranging pages and sections

A consistent theme from our interviewees was the idea that digital books—ebooks in particular—were only useful for the kind of linear reading associated with novels or other non-academic texts.
The issue when it comes to scholarly reading is that it is a much more dynamic, active, and interactive process that is simply not supported by existing platforms.

when you find it in digital format, and you’re thinking digital? That should be limitless and it’s not. It says the book is checked out, and it’s not clear whether it’s checked out for an hour or for a month, or do I just keep checking back? There’s no way to get notification when you’ve been accessing. I think that is the biggest frustration from a direct user perspective.”