Nowadays, scholars use various ICT tools as part of their scholarly workflows. Individual scholarly activities that might be supported by these ICT tools include the finding, storing and analysing of information as well as the writing sharing and publishing of research results. However, despite the widespread use of ICT tools in the research process (more than 600 ICT tools have been identified), a scholar’s information frequently gets fragmented across these different tools.

In this research project, we will design and develop a software platform called ROSS (Researcher’s One-Stop Shop) to better integrate a scholar’s information across different existing ICT tools and media types. First, we will perform a literature review and conduct a survey/interview to learn more about the common problems that scholars face, in particular with respect to the fragmentation of information, when using different ICT tools as part of their workflows. We will then design a model for personal information management (PIM) and develop the ROSS software platform for better integrating information managed by different scholarly ICT tools as illustrated in Fig. 1. ROSS will offer scholars the possibility to manually create links between information managed by these existing ICT tools and these links can later be used to refind information (that has been linked by the user before). The ROSS platform will enable scholars to manually link and annotate existing resources as well as to create their notes, and all that information will be stored in a local database and can only be used by that individual scholar as part of their workflows.

While we will first deal with digital information only, in the second stage of the project we also plan to investigate the integration of printed and digital media based on off-the-shelf solutions for paper-digital integration (e.g. digital pen and paper technology). In this case, a scholar will be able to manually create links between parts of paper documents and the digital content managed by the ROSS platform. Finally, the usability and performance of the ROSS solution for better integrated next generation scholarly workflows across different existing ICT tools will be evaluated in a lab setting as well as in a field study.

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