Ryan Shaw
Assistant Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Patrick Golden
Doctoral Student
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research and teaching are now highly dependent on information resources published on the Web, whether these are research datasets, scholarly collections, or knowledge organization systems. Typically, the publishing of such resources on the Web takes one of two forms: “raw” data is made available for bulk download, or a database-driven website is developed for interacting with the remote resources through a Web browser. Both approaches have some significant disadvantages. Bulk downloads of data are not easily searched, filtered, or transformed by users without the requisite programming skills. Working with downloaded data also introduces provenance and versioning problems as information resources change over time. On the other hand, database-driven websites require a greater initial investment and incur significant ongoing maintenance and preservation costs. When these sites inevitably go down, research and teaching are disrupted. This briefing will discuss a way to build a scholarly information infrastructure that provides the best of both worlds: the constant availability and speed of working with resources locally, with the user-friendliness and provenance tracking of a centralized remote repository. As proof of this concept the briefing will focus on the architecture of PeriodO, a gazetteer of scholarly definitions of historical, art-historical, and archaeological periods. We hope that this briefing will provoke a discussion about the advantages and limitations of hybrid online/offline scholarly information resources.