Scholars’ Panel Explores Digital Scholarship Needs.

A basic problem for scholars who use digital resources is the lack of persistent identifiers --permanent and trusted Internet addresses-- for online objects....Another barrier to digital scholarship is the failure of faculty promotion and rewards structures to accommodate the shift from a print-based to a digital world of scholarly publishing and communications. "It is no accident that most humanists and social scientists working with digital media are post-tenure," one participant observed....While scholars at the DLF meeting favored the idea of having a long-term safe haven for their digital content (especially if it was curated by the library), they voiced concern about ownership rights to their work, how permissions would be managed, and what it would take to prepare material for a repository. They reemphasized that there was no link between the reuse of a scholarly asset and current faculty rewards systems. The scholars' reaction to sharable and harvestable metadata was far more positive. The creation of simple metadata records that can be harvested, such as those promoted by the Open Archives Initiative, is a first step toward building services that include records from many sites and arrange them in one service or portal. The scholars were interested in this mechanism as a way to help make their own work more visible and to gather references to related material.