Lunch & Learn: Collaboration tools for scholars with Angel Brady

Photo credit: Johann Larrson, via Flickr. CC license, 2010.

Today’s Lunch ‘n Learn, pre­sented by Angel Brady of Princeton’s Human­i­ties Resource Cen­ter con­sid­ered the topic of “Col­lab­o­ra­tion Tools for Scholars.”

Brady demon­strated sev­eral free tools that facil­i­tate schol­arly col­lab­o­ra­tion. Most were on sites exter­nal to the Prince­ton com­put­ing envi­ron­ment, one, Web­Space, is a Princeton-only resource.

Brady explained that these new tools are pop­u­lar because they are stored on exter­nal servers that keep shared resources up to date, and ensure that col­lab­o­ra­tors are always work­ing on the lat­est versions.Most of the tools also include social media fea­tures that allow fur­ther com­mu­ni­ca­tion and sharing.

For­merly, try­ing to share, write, or gather research mate­ri­als while work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively relied upon repeated email exchanges, pos­si­ble mis-matches between soft­ware ver­sions, cross-platform issues, email boxes going over quota, and var­i­ous ver­sions of a file being in cir­cu­la­tion at the same time. A major advan­tage to these new cloud-based ser­vices is that they are browser-based, are cross-platform, and that they allow mul­ti­ple edi­tors to work simultaneously.

Many of the func­tions per­formed by these tools can be repli­cated by other appli­ca­tions at Prince­ton– often more securely. How­ever the ease of use, the fact that these tools are in com­mon use among schol­ars, that stu­dents have equal access to them, and the advan­tage of syn­chro­nous edit­ing make them very attrac­tive for the types of col­lab­o­ra­tive doc­u­ments and resources  that require medium secu­rity, and that need to be shared with peo­ple from all over the word. For uni­ver­sity busi­ness that requires the trans­mis­sion of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, web-based exter­nal ser­vices should NOT be used.

The tools dis­cussed today were Mende­ley and Zotero, tools for amass­ing an online research col­lec­tion, bubbl.us, a mind-mapping ser­vice, Pos­ter­ous Groups, a sub-function of a pop­u­lar micro-blogging site, Google Doc­u­ments an online office suite of appli­ca­tions, Drop­box and Web­Space, two file-sharing ser­vices, and Diigo, a social book­mark­ing tool.

Mende­ley and Zotero

Mede­ley and Zotero per­form very sim­i­lar func­tions in that they orga­nize ref­er­ence and research mate­ri­als found online, and also have social-media func­tions. These tools can be used to gather links to resources such as jour­nal arti­cles and web pages, book­mark, and anno­tate them. Down­load­ing sim­i­lar doc­u­ments and links to one’s desk­top can result in file names that don’t reveal the actual con­tent of the down­loaded file, and these “mys­tery PDFs” can be dif­fi­cult to share. Mende­ley and Zotero allow you to make online fold­ers of doc­u­ments, and auto­mat­i­cally down­load the meta­data asso­ci­ated with files, includ­ing titles, abstracts, and tags, list­ing them in a clear library-like for­mat. You can also alter and add to the meta­data. Notes, high­light­ing, and orga­ni­za­tion within groups and fold­ers can be accom­plished in either appli­ca­tion. Ref­er­ence col­lec­tions can be make pub­lic or pri­vate, and both tools have the abil­ity to find other pub­lic libraries orga­nized by peo­ple who share your research interests,

Mende­ley is a desk­top client orig­i­nally designed as a PDF anno­ta­tion tool (it also sup­ports .txt files). It also has app ver­sions for the iPhone, iPad and iPod­Touch. Mende­lay works with bib­li­o­graphic cita­tion for­mats such as Bib­TeX, Research Info Sys­tems (RIS), Zotero Library and End­note XML. A free account in Mende­ley allows for 500MB of per­sonal stor­age space, as well as 500MB of shared space. Both pri­vate and pub­lic groups are sup­ported, but the free account lim­its pri­vate groups to 5; with each group hav­ing a max­i­mum of 10 mem­bers. Group folder track all group activ­ity, and it is pos­si­ble for the orig­i­nal group owner to reas­sign own­er­ship to another user if nec­es­sary, so that exist­ing group work does not have to be recre­ated in a new account. There is a book­marklet tool to make it easy to import sources found on the web.

Mende­ley platforms:

Cloud-based, with desk­top apps for MacOS, Win­dows and Linux.

Zotero Groups is part of Zotero, a Fire­fox add-in that works with Mac, Win­dows and Linux (a stand-alone ver­sion of Zotero for Chrome and Safari users is avail­able in alpha). Group Libraries, both pub­lic and pri­vate can be cre­ated. The Fire­fox plu­gin can cap­ture jour­nal and book infor­ma­tion with one click. High­lights and notes can be added to con­tent. Library own­er­ship can be trans­ferred to another user. Zotero can also be used as a bib­li­o­graphic tool, with a drag and drop fea­ture to MS Word (Zotero export bib­li­o­graphic infor­ma­tion in the RIS for­mat, which End­Note can import.). Your Zotero library has an RSS feed that can be fol­lowed by group mem­bers, to notify them of updates. Zotero was designed for aca­d­e­mics, and was orig­i­nally cre­ated at George Mason Uni­ver­sity. Stor­age space for a free account is 100MB.

Zotero plat­forms:

Cloud-based, and a Fire­fox add-in com­pat­i­ble with MacOS, Win­dows and Linux ver­sions of Fire­fox; a client for Chrome and Safari is in the works.

Bubbl.us

For the visu­ally minded, Bubbl.us is a tool that allows col­lab­o­ra­tive mind-mapping via a series of con­nected bub­bles that dia­gram related con­cepts. The free ver­sion of the cloud ser­vice allows 3 “sheets” of mind-maps to be cre­ated; more are avail­able with a paid upgrade. Groups can be made for edit­ing (read/write/delete) or read-only access to Bubbl.us mind maps, but group mem­bers must join Bubbl.us to participate.

Fin­ished mind-maps can be exported as .jpg or .png image files, but the appli­ca­tion itself uses Adobe Flash to cre­ate the inter­ac­tive maps. Maps can also be embed­ded in an exter­nal web page as a way to share them with oth­ers. Although the tool is very sim­ple, as mind-mapping tools go, it also has a very min­i­mal learn­ing curve. Most sim­i­lar tools are fee-based.

Bubbl.us plat­forms:

cloud-based

Posterus Groups

Posterus, a pop­u­lar micro-blogging site (think “Twit­ter,” but with the abil­ity to make groups) also has the abil­ity to make sim­ple col­lab­o­ra­tive web­sites for blog­ging among group mem­bers or mul­ti­ple groups. Pos­ter­ous posts can include both text, images (with auto­matic slide shows for posts with mul­ti­ple images), links and PDFs with a 100MB upload limit per post. Pos­ter­ous sites can be pri­vate (password-protected) or pub­lic, and post­ing is pos­si­ble using a num­ber of devices, includ­ing mobile phones, emails or book­marklets. Respond­ing to or adding to posts is also pos­si­ble via email. For a researcher in the field or on the go, it can be an invalu­able tool to share infor­ma­tion with group mem­bers almost instantly. Groups are pri­vate by default, and have no lim­its on the num­ber of mem­bers. Pos­ter­ous can be linked to exist­ing sites on social net­works such as Face­book or Twitter.

Pos­ter­ous platforms:

Cloud-based, works on mobile browsers as well as desk­top ones.

&dt=document#document”>Google Docs

Google Docs is a great tool to use for real-time or asyn­chro­nous col­lab­o­ra­tion with col­leagues; sev­eral users can be work­ing on a doc­u­ment at any given time (with visual hints to other edi­tors as to what parts of the doc­u­ment other users are edit­ing, and almost instant updat­ing of new con­tent.) The Google Docs include famil­iar office-type appli­ca­tions includ­ing a word proces­sor, a spread­sheet tool, a slide show cre­ator, and a tool for build­ing forms. Doc­u­ments cre­ated in Google Docs are com­pat­i­ble with other sim­i­lar desk­top based appli­ca­tions, such as Open Office, Microsoft Office, and iWorks, and files can be imported and exported from one to the other.

Col­lab­o­ra­tors all need a Google account to use Google Docs, but it does not need to be a Gmail account — any email address can be reg­is­tered with a Google account. Var­i­ous saved states of a doc­u­ments are stored and can be reviewed and reverted to when needed. Own­er­ship of var­i­ous shared doc­u­ments can be reas­signed to another group mem­ber, and col­leagues can be invited to edit as a pri­vate group, or be com­pletely public.

Google Docs is very pop­u­lar with Prince­ton stu­dents, but should not be used to share secure course infor­ma­tion that would be bet­ter put into Black­board or another Princeton-managed stor­age space, how­ever for casual col­lab­o­ra­tion, par­tic­u­larly out­side Prince­ton, it’s a great tool.

Google Docs platforms:

cloud-based

Web­Space and Drop­box

Web­Space is a file-sharing plat­form that Prince­ton has licensed from a com­pany called Xythos, a sub­sidiary of the Black­board Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem. Xythos is an enterprise-level doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem that allows for users to set up work­flows, reten­tion strate­gies, and enter meta­data for stored doc­u­ments. Every­one at Prince­ton with a valid netid has 5GB of stor­age on WebSpace.

Web­Space has built-in inte­gra­tion with Black­board course web­sites, allow­ing shared stor­age for course par­tic­i­pants. A pop­u­lar fea­ture of the Black­board com­po­nent is the drop box, which allows stu­dents to share work with each other, and another fea­ture that allows instruc­tors to post links to files stored in Web­Space directly to one, or more, Black­board sites.

Web­Space can also do sim­ple file shar­ing on a file-by-file or folder level. Web­Space inte­grates with the Uni­ver­sity LDAP, so it is easy to make groups within the Prince­ton com­mu­nity. A “ticket” to a file or folder can also be shared with any­one in the world with an email address. Tick­ets con­tain a spe­cific URL to the shared mate­r­ial that sets edit­ing per­mis­sions, the dura­tion of these per­mis­sions, and shares the file directly via Web­Space rather than send­ing it as an email attach­ment. In all cases, users can “sub­scribe” to a folder or file that is shared with them to receive noti­fi­ca­tion of changes. Files in Web­Space can also be made pub­lic, and each has a unique URL so that oth­ers can link to them.

A desk­top client is avail­able for 32-bit Win­dows machines. A Mac ver­sion is in beta. For those for whom the client does not work, the Web­Space drive can be mapped as a net­work drive.

Drop­box is the most pop­u­lar of the cloud-based file shar­ing ser­vices as a stand-alone appli­ca­tion, and is also used by many other appli­ca­tions as a stor­age mech­a­nism. Drop­box allows for pub­lic or pri­vate file shar­ing among groups and indi­vid­u­als. Drop­box group mem­bers must also be mem­bers of Dropbox.

Drop­box can be mounted as a web drive on Mac and Win­dows, and also has a desk­top client for Mac, Win­dows and Linux. Drop­box is used for many mobile appli­ca­tions, and auto­mat­i­cally syncs all ver­sions to the web. Drop­box free accounts have 2GB of stor­age, and can track changes, for some level of doc­u­ment ver­sion­ing control.

Plat­forms:

Cloud-based, Mac, Win­dows, and Linux. Both tools can be used for file shar­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tion, and while Drop­box is the eas­ier tool to use, Web­Space has inte­gra­tion with Princeton-specific resources that can aid collaboration.

Diigo

Diigo is a social book­mark­ing tool that allows you to book­mark web pages, anno­tate and high­light them, and then share your marks pub­licly or pri­vately. You can cre­ate groups for gath­er­ing and shar­ing book­marks. Book­marks are orga­nized by tags, and group own­er­ship can be trans­ferred to another user. Diigo, and Diigo­let, the Diigo book­marklet tool, work with Fire­fox and Chrome. For fans of Deli­cious, a pop­u­lar social book­mark­ing among schol­ars that has been around for years, Diigo is a good alter­na­tive. (Delicious’s new owner, Yahoo!, has announced that it will soon “sun­set” Deli­cious.) Diigo has an import tool that will ingest your exist­ing Deli­cious book­marks, and at lest for now, has a set­ting that will allow you to book­mark sites in Diigo and Deli­cious simultaneously.

A copy of the pre­sen­ta­tion used in the talk is vis­i­ble here:

The pre­sen­ta­tion can also be viewed online here, or down­loaded from this loca­tion.

A pod­cast will be posted here shortly.