PADLs: Supporting digital scholarship in digital libraries

This paper introduces digital scholarship: a process in which individuals perform all scholarly work electronically, working entirely with digital media. A proposal is made for patron-augmented digital libraries (PADLs): a class of digital libraries designed to support the digital scholarship of its patrons. PADLs not only provide facilities for search and retrieval of library artefacts, but also allow patrons to augment the library's collection with new artefacts such as annotations, original compositions and organisational structures. Finally, a prototype PADL (called Synchrony) providing access to digitised video segments and associated textual transcripts is described. Synchrony allows patrons to search its collection for artefacts, create annotations/original compositions, integrate these artefacts to form synchronized mixed text and video presentations and, after suitable review, publish these presentations into the digital library if desired.