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What Is the Public Knowledge Project?
The Public Knowledge Project is dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Bringing together scholars, in a number of fields, as well as research librarians, it is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. The project seeks to integrate emerging standards for digital library access and document preservation, such as Open Archives and InterPARES, as well as for such areas as topic maps and doctoral dissertations. As part of this effort, the Public Knowledge Project is also evaluating ways of integrating research studies with other forms of knowledge, including documents pertaining to, in the case of the social sciences, for example, practices, programs, and policies. It is also looking at ways of integrating this research with access to digital archival sources, whether consisting of documents or multimedia files. It is assessing the collaborative potential of knowledge sharing among communities of interest, in such areas as education, with an eye to reducing the theory-practice and research-policy gaps. It uses an iterative and participatory design model that will involve professionals, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and the public in building and evaluating a series of collaborative knowledge management website prototypes. These prototypes will be used to learn more about how interface design, data architecture, and software tools affect the professional and public engagement with educational research. In the case of social science areas such as the study of education, such models will be field-tested in conjunction with professional-development courses, research publications, and policy reviews. In each case, the project will investigate participants' understanding of research as a form of knowledge and how its value is affected by these new online environments. In this way, the Public Knowledge Project speaks to the urgent need for a greater understanding of these new technologies' potential contribution to knowledge's public sphere, even as scholarly organizations and publishers increasingly turn to the web. It seeks to expand the realm of public education by improving social science's contribution to public knowledge, in the belief that such a contribution is critical to both the public use of reason and deliberative forms of democracy. |
