A grant of $425,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help Indiana University expand its digital library of information about shared natural and societal resources known to public policy-makers as “the commons.” These resources include a diverse set of elements ranging from air, land and water to genomic data, property rights and the Internet. The grant will also allow IU researchers to initiate a study of scholarly communication as information commons.

In August 2002, IU researchers established the “Digital Library of the Commons.” By digitizing and preserving literature on the study of the commons and creating a global depository for international research, the online library was created to serve an interdisciplinary worldwide community that includes policy-makers, scientists, economists, educators, and practitioners. A goal of the project is to make scholarly research about human management of the commons available broadly to the developed and developing world.  

 “We’re interested in the interaction between resources and people,” says Charlotte Hess, librarian at IU’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.  “We explore the decisions and rules people make to determine the outcome of these resources.”

Hess says that researchers are interested not simply in forests, for example, but in communal forest systems or the sustainability of forests over time.  “We focus on the question of how people sustain, or don’t sustain, resources,” she says.

One of the new digitization projects, jointly undertaken by IU’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and the IU Digital Library Program, will create a searchable database of photographs, maps and satellite images of “common” areas such as forests, fisheries, city streets, playgrounds and grazing systems.

“Currently there is no such image database available for researchers interested in these issues,” says Kris Brancolini, director of IU’s Digital Library Program.  “We’re building on our earlier work creating a full-text resource in this area, the Digital Library of the Commons, which will be expanded to include links between full-text articles and images.”  Researchers will also be able to self-publish their papers as well as photos or maps of their research sites online, says Brancolini.

The database will draw from the extensive print collections of IU’s Workshop Research Library, which contains the world’s largest collection of research material relating to common-pool resources. “There’s no other library in the world like this one,” Hess says. Last year, the library hosted scholars from 19 countries, including Australia, Nepal, Kenya, Korea, and Mexico.

Digital libraries are themselves common-pool resources, Hess says.  The award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will also enable Hess and Elinor Ostrom, director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, to include the study of new technologies, legislation, and scholarly communication in the broader study of the commons, an area in which they have been deeply involved for many years. 

“Just like the term ‘environment’ was created to convey the relationships between natural resources, animals, air, and water,” Hess explains, “we want to create a new research agenda that studies the whole ‘ecosystem’ of information. For instance, new technologies and recent legislation are changing the nature of libraries, research, the university, the economy, and society. 

And while some information is more accessible through the Internet, other important types of the ‘intellectual public domain’ are becoming less and less accessible.  Scholarly information and digital libraries are complex common-pool resources that need to be better understood in order to be protected and sustained.”

In addition to assembling world-renowned researchers to explore the commons, IU scholars will also work with colleagues at the Makerere University in Uganda to develop a plan to create a digital library of the commons for Eastern Africa, as a testbed for other research sites in developing countries.

IU’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, a research center on the Bloomington campus since 1975, is a home to an extensive interdisciplinary research agenda and has affiliated faculty in the Departments of Economics, Political Science, and Psychology, as well as the Kelley School of Business and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

The Digital Library Program at Indiana University has extensive experience in creating online resources for researchers and is a joint project of  IU Libraries, Office of the Vice President for Information technology, the School of Library and Information Science, and the School of Informatics.

Related link:   Digital Library of the Commons    http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu