At the moment, even if you can concentrate on work, you might encounter several unanticipated challenges. One of them is access to literature absent from the large-scale repositories such as JStor, academia.edu or your own library. Archives and libraries remain unreachable. Archivists and librarians are doing all they can to move as much online as they can but they too should look out for themselves and their loved ones first and foremost. And while researchers and teachers cannot (I repeat: can not) do the work that archivists and librarians do, what we can do at the present moment is come together and engage in the age-old practice of sharing resources. And while this is being done already in many instances bilaterally, this contribution is concerned with a way to do it communally, to help students and teachers get around paywalls and other current inhibitors. Of course, this will always be useful to those without institutional access.
Here, I will present one way of using an existing platform to share documents, be they books, articles, images, or even sound files. The general idea is to bring together people needing a certain article, book, image or other sort of image, recording or source with others who have access to it. A kind of academic Ebay, maybe? While the browser based app Trello is first and foremost a project management tool, it is flexible enough to serve this purpose. It has several advantages.
- The platform I am suggesting is free of cost (although it requires a registration).
- It’s navigation is intuitive and easy to learn.
- It offers good searchability.
- It can be reproduced and set up easily by people with little experience in the digital world (if I can do it, so can you).
In short, Trello is organized into Boards, which in turn consist of Cards grouped into different columns. it offers a full-text search and color coded labels. Trello also links up to Dropbox. This is all you need to create your own document sharing platform.
Trello board is the framework in which you keep all the Cards relevant to a certain topic, course, research project or grant application. For instance, I have created two boards, one for primary sources and one for secondary literature. You can participate in as many boards as you need, some collaborative and other private, and copy individual cards from one to the other as you see fit.
Every board consists of several columns, in which you can add Cards. I recommend putting each reference you are looking for in a separate Card. This makes it easier for other members in the shared board to see what you are looking for and where they might contribute with files they have. Moreover, if they have the one article or monograph, they can mark the Cards immediately as available (see below). Also, if you want to add this reference to your own lists, you can simply copy it there.
This is further required because of how the Cards are laid out. They consist of a title, which is visible on a board when the Card is closed, a description, an activity section, and offer color coded labels, which are also visible on the board. For the title, I suggest using a uniform short version like Author (Date) or Author-Short Title, as only so many words can be displayed when the Card is closed. The full bibliographic information should be put in the Description (and nothing else). The Activity section can be used like a chat function. Here you can add other members of the same board who you think might have access to a certain article you are looking for. This should also be the place where people can discuss and recommend further studies or sources.
Finally, the color coded labels are helpful in bringing order into chaos. Depending on the size and activity of your group, the layout could become confusing after a while. The color codes help to immediately identify which cards are still required by someone. My initial idea was to include only two labels, red for required and green for available. Another option would be to apply a two- or three-tier system (yellow to red) for which studies you need more urgently than others. This structures the entire request system.
The columns further structure the board. There is a great variety of how to name them: one each per group member, per course or per subject area. In any case, I would recommend adding two further columns. One of them serves for documentation of the Board itself and the other can serve as the ‘dirty closet’. The former should include Cards dedicated to different aspects of etiquette; e.g. how you agree to phrase the titles, what info needs to be in a Card, or what to do with a card once the relevant document has been made available. This also helps to bring new members up to date.
The other extra column can serve as a place where you can move all the Cards that are not needed anymore at this specific point but could be needed by others again. Trello also offers an archiving option, and those cards are still searchable even though they are not visible in the board anymore. Either way, this can help keep the other columns slim.
There are a number of ways how you can actually share the documents or files to which individual cards refer. The most convenient one is certainly using one sharing platform like Dropbox or Box, who can easily be implemented with Trello. And then you are set to go.
Hazine is aware of debates around institutional access, internet piracy, and publishing. This article is intended for clearly restricted groups in the same way as readers for seminars are; it is especially recommended for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Images are credited to Torsten Wollina.