Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition of Networked Information
Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure & Choices for Libraries
9:00-9:45am
- Will not be doing a musical performance this morning
- Observations about scholarship/teaching/learning are changing & implications of policy changes
- What do these changes open up for librarians?
- Cyberinfrastructure
- most of rest of the world you can talk to people about e-science
- practice of science has been transformed by
- high performance computation
- high performance networking
- large scalle management/org/reuse of data
- 2002 report, Atkins commission, how is science & engineering in the US changing
- what changes need to be made?
- “cyberinfrastructure”
- data management
- data visualization
- people!
- National Virtual Observatories
- People not interested in IP issues w/ astronomy
- metadata is free/bulit-in to observational equipment
- enormous sky sruveys patch together from many different sources
- no longer about getting observational time
- algorhythms are being written to analyze data instead of needing more observational data
- opens up astronomy to school kids
- [I read about the democratization of astronomy in The Long Tail last night…]
- how do we get data resued and preserved?
- how do we assist the scientists to mark this data consistently?
- first focused on engineering
- all of this technology can also be applied to the humanities and the social sciences
- american council of learned societies report coming out soon on this issue
- these approaches need to be used in not just the hard sciences
- there are controversies about whether these technologies are changing the way humanites are studied
- “phisics changes one funeral at a time”
- questions
- human subjects
- privacy
- intellectual property
- access to evidence
- Could we digitize all the literature of all the cultures that have ever existed? Images?
- Mass digitization projects
- Microsoft
- European Digital Library
- What about the “non-published” stuff? (Museums)
- what are the roles and responsibilites of museums of publically stored materials?
- Most stuff is pre-1923 / out of copyright
- they’re monitizing those items
- seems inappropriate to some
- “public trust”
- digitize materials to make them available to the society at large
- Special collections
- papers of persons and institutions
- important to researchers
- collections are changing in character / going digital
- Salman Rushdie’s papers & e-mail
- items are being created in digital form
- Problem of scale
- study of older times, there’s a paucity of evidence
- modern times, too much information
- What’s coming out of this
- needs are shifting from getting the tech to work to informatics
- organize data
- backup data
- confidentiality
- tend to focus on big projects
- large projects
- large teams
- highly organized
- big $
- what about the projects with small groups working on small issues
- small staff
- small $
- how we support these people
- deal with on a diciplinary basis or institutional basis?
- Will end up with a patchwork of solutions to this problem
- will be dynamic not static
- fashions, interests and budgets wax & wane
- Roles of libraries in all this
- big research universities & info tech workforce 15yrs ago vs now
- then: worked for central IT
- now: more than half now in departments, schools, labs, etc. / closer to researchers & teachers
- facing demands for data curration
- more want to share & reuse data
- shifting norms re: information sxchange
- retiring faculty / what to do with all this data i’ve accumulated?
- institutions finding that there’s “value” to the data
- data mgt & sharing plan in grant proposals
- how will it be preserved
- how will it be shared
- institutions making sure that these rules are adhered to
- data lost in gulf disasters of last year
- was there backups?
- ACRL report on all this due out soon
- who’s supposed to be doing the work?
- new professional
- mythological
- “data scientist”
- what do these people need to know
- general?
- diciplinary?
- can we do this for each dicipline or more generalists or hybrid
- major workforce issues
- sale of problem is large
- we’re going to need a lot of people to work on this
- are these people librarians?
- libraries as institutions
- big research libraries
- most profoundly changed already
- strugging to keep up w/ amount of data via budgets
- access issues
- main role has been to apy for journals
- journals now electronic
- access has shifted out of the library
- some people therefore believe access to these sources is free
- policy choices?
- already overstressed, can’t deal with it
- humanities strategy, hard sciences are on their own
- need to move resource away from published lit & into more active engagement with the scholarly process
- three very different pathways
- different institutions will take different paths
- movement into more inter-institutional collaboration
- rapid rise of virtual organizations
- cross multiple boundaries
- other libraries
- huge demand for access
- will see in many different areas
- undergrads
- k-12
- will effect many libraries
- Nature of personal history is changing
- issue for any cultural memory orgainzation, not just libraries
- scope of those interests are getting broader
- rise of amature observational science
- bottany
- astronomy
- biology
- geology
- libraries of all types need to be mindful of all the changes this type of research is bringing
- will force strategic change
