Let me start with an example based on integrating more of the typical scholarly apparatus into my own scholarly/research work. I gather many references to interesting articles and websites in the course of my resarch. My wiki is actually full of them, as well as my
EccoPro files, Powerpoint presentations, Word documents, email that I send and receive, my web browser histories and favorites lists, not to mention my Endnote, Refworks, and BibTeX bibliographic databases. On top of my own sources of bibliographic information are those to be found in library catalogs, search engines, databases of scholarly articles, other people's weblogs, RSS aggregators, etc. In other words, my references are all over the place, in disparate formats, of varying degrees of formality. Yet, I would ideally like to handle all bibliographic references in a convenient, probably unified, way. I'd like to be able to search through all the sources, find any reference based on some criteria I specify, gather them in collections, and republish them, either as lists or as references embedded as citations in some larger work. I would like to do so with minimum of technical wrangling with formats and undue amount of upfront work (such as forced entry of all bibliographic references in a central database). I'm tempted to throw in another example, this time using images, but it is not needed here. Although the details for images are different from the situation for references, the situation is fundamentally the same: images that I own or want to use scattered throughout the network but I want to use in a unified way.
In the example I gave, I stuck to one data type -- either bibliographic references or images. Of course, in conducting any serious scholarly work, I would want to bring together a mix of digital content types, images as well as references, newspaper clippings, maps, datasets. The range of materials can actually be very diverse. The scholar-geek in me becomes conflicted in a situation. The scholar wants to bring together all the relevant information, regardless of the source or type in question and handle them
