The University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics in partnership with the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has been awarded a $517,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop and pilot “EthicShare,” an online Web site and bibliographic database for ethics scholars to discover and share high quality digital articles and other materials—scholarly and popular press articles, multimedia objects, pre-prints, and archival documents.
During the pilot phase, the EthicShare team will develop features for users to rate, comment on, and vet content, allowing EthicShare to establish new forms of editorial control and community participation in the growth and future of the Web site.
“EthicShare is a groundbreaking opportunity for scholars to work together to create a new approach to identifying and sharing the best materials in ethics,” says Jeffrey Kahn, Director of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics and one of the project’s principal investigators. “The technologies we are putting to work will allow for detailed searching, including the ability to use reviews and quality ratings by colleagues as a way to find and select scholarly materials. EthicShare will also create a way for scholars to share works in progress and collaborate on new ideas.”
The EthicShare pilot is a continuation of an earlier grant awarded to the University of Minnesota by the Council of Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) with funds from the Mellon Foundation. EthicShare grows out of a planning partnership with Indiana University-Bloomington; Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis; the University of Virginia; and Georgetown University. This phase of EthicShare is bolstered by newly established relationships with the National Library of Medicine (NLM), OCLC, and others.
EthicShare is part of a larger trend towards discipline-specific online communities that support the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences—all fields that play a role in practical ethics scholarship. Recent priorities of American Council of Learned Societies, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, as well as the University of Minnesota, have included strategies to build community and support collaborative exchange among scholars distributed across the globe.
As a partnership between the Center for Bioethics, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the University Libraries, EthicShare is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together a diverse but deep commitment to innovation in the areas of information discovery, scholarly exchange, and dissemination. Wendy Pradt Lougee, University Librarian, and Computer Science and Engineering professor John Riedl, both co-principal investigators along with Professor Kahn, are leaders in the fields of digital library development, and social networking and collaborative filtering, respectively.
Together with Professor Kahn, Lougee and Riedl hope to develop a virtual community for scholars that serves as a model for scholarly research for fields beyond practical ethics.
