Cyberinfrastructure and CNI

Digital Resources for Teaching, Learning and Research

The growing reliance on digital resources is a trend that is well documented. The availability and diversity of such resources continues to expand as demand for their use in research and instructional settings increases. Enabling the development and use of such resources by disparate groups with disparate needs is a daunting task that requires complex planning; strong collaborative relationships (including the private sector); innovative design and development techniques; and multiple levels of evaluation.

Framework for Supporting Digital Resources

In the last month two foundational documents have emerged outlining approaches to building the framework that will transform teaching, learning and research on our campuses. That framework, which is now being called the “cyberinfrastructure” consists of the resources, services, facilities, standards, and communities of practice necessary to support digital teaching and research that is economical, academically sound, and accessible.

 

Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences (July 18, 2006)

The report by the Council of Learned Societies adopts the NSF coined “cyberinfrastructure” and recognizes that new technologies; new technological resources; and new technology-based services “now shape the way that scholars discover and make sense of the human record, while also shaping the way those understandings are communicated to students, colleagues, and the general public.” While the report recognizes that the humanities and social sciences have moved more slowly than the sciences in this arena, it acknowledges that these disciplines are on the verge of significant change and, thus, must contribute to the development of a shared “cynberinfrastructure” that also allows for discipline-specific flexibility..

Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21^st Century Discovery (July 20, 2006)

Issued by the National Science Foundation, this report calls for “the development and support of a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure essential to 21st century advances in science and engineering research and education.” It outlines their plans for a “secure, efficient, reliable, accessible, usable, and interoperable” network of high performance computing; data, data analysis and visualization; cyber-services and virtual organizations; and learning and workforce development.

What is a “Cyberinfrastructure”?

Both documents have distinct but complementary definitions. The ACLS report identifies it as “a layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry but developed for specific scholarly purposes.” It adds “is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource…for example, digital history collections and the collaborative environments in which to explore and analyze them from multiple disciplinary perspectives might be considered cyberinfrastructure, whereas fiber-optic cables and storage area networks or basic communication protocols would fall below the line for cyberinfrastructure”.

The NSF document defines it much more specifically as something that “integrates hardware for computing, data and networks, digitally-enabled sensors, observatories and experimental facilities, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools. Investments in interdisciplinary teams and cyberinfrastructure professionals with expertise in algorithm development, system operations, and applications development are also essential to exploit the full power of cyberinfrastructure to create, disseminate, and preserve scientific data, information, and knowledge.”

What does this have to do with libraries?

Everything! The role of the academic librarian has changed dramatically in the last decade. We now routinely hear about “blended librarians”, “shifted librarians”, and “NextGen librarians”. However, such “revolutionary” descriptions are based firmly on our traditions of service, access, and collaboration.

Our participation in the development of a cyberinfrastructure for digital teaching, learning and research is therefore simply a maturing of our traditional role. In fact, if digital scholarship in the sciences, social sciences or humanities is to be successful, it must include librarians who have recognized strengths in:

“a) building a digital collection of information for further study and analysis;

b) creating appropriate tools for collection-building;

c) creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study of collections;

d) using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new knowledge, interpretation, understanding; and

e) creating authoring tools for presenting these new ideas, either in traditional forms or in digital form.”

Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences

It will be of no surprise to anyone involved in the humanities or social sciences that we are moving in this direction. It will be even less surprising to those in science, engineering and medicine. What may be less clear to some is what role will be played by the librarians, archivists, and curators who act as the primary source of trusted knowledge and the stewards of our intellectual and cultural assets.

Librarians have always be involved in the building of “secure, efficient, reliable, accessible, usable, and interoperable” academic (cyber)infrastructures. As the boundaries blur, it is librarians with our emphasis on service, collaboration and access who are perfectly positioned to provide the leadership that will lead to successful projects involving faculty, information technologists, instructional technologists, and others on our campuses and beyond.

Today I am pleased to announce that McMaster University is becoming a member of the Coalition for Networked Information (http://www.cni.org/). CNI is “an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.” Our membership in this organization will assist us in developing the expertise necessary to advance our own initiatives and provide us with an opportunity to engage in a broader dialogue about the issues that are having an impact on the academy. I look forward to sharing more information about our involvement in CNI with you in future posts.