Ellysa Stern Cahoy
Education & Behavioral Sciences Librarian
Pennsylvania State University
This project briefing presents preliminary findings of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project currently underway at Pennsylvania (Penn) State University, University Park, exploring personal archiving and the digital scholarly workflow of Penn State faculty across disciplines encompassing the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The project aims to create a set of design principles for sustained easy integration of archival practices into the online scholarly workflow, as well as identification of critical digital literacies for faculty management of personal information collections, and a set of recommendations for liaison librarians on best practices for supporting faculty in further developing these critical literacies.
The first research phase of the project concluded in fall 2012 and included surveying over 300 Penn State faculty across a variety of disciplines with regard to their common information management practices, as well as about scholars’ general experiences in using digital research tools and resources. Ethnographic interviews with approximately 25 faculty members were conducted as follow-up to the initial survey results, and were designed to dig deeper into faculty needs with regard to the scholarly workflow, including user challenges and critical literacies surrounding self-archiving and curation of personal information collections. The broad results of the survey data and interviews will be shared as part of the project briefing, as well as the planned future trajectory of the project.
 http://scholarlyworkflow.org