The Institutional Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and E-Research

E-Research and E-Scholarship The Institutional Challenges Cyberinfrastructureof and E-Research cholarly practices across an astoundingly wide range of disciplines have become profoundly and irrevocably changed By Clifford Lynch by the application of advanced information technology. This collection of new and emergent scholarly practices was first widely recognized in the science and engineering disciplines. In the late 1990s, the term e-science (or occasionally, particularly in Asia, cyber-science) began to be used as a shorthand for these new methods and approaches. The United Kingdom launched Sits formal e-science program in 2001.1 In the United States, a multi-year inquiry, having its roots in supercomputing support for the portfolio of science and engineering disciplines funded by the National Science Foundation, culminated in the production of the “Atkins Report” in 2003, though there was considerable delay before NSF began to act program- matically on the report.2 The quantitative social sciences—which are largely part of NSF’s funding purview and which have long traditions of data curation and sharing, as well as the use of high-end statistical com- putation—received more detailed examination in a 2005 NSF report.3 Key leaders in the humanities and qualitative social sciences recognized that IT-driven innovation in those disciplines was also well advanced, though less uniformly adopted (and indeed sometimes controversial). In fact, the humanities continue to showcase some of the most creative and transformative examples of the use of information technology to create new scholarship.4 Based on this recognition of the immense disciplinary scope of the impact of information technology, the more inclusive term e-research (occasionally, e-scholarship) has come into common use, at least in North America and Europe. Clifford Lynch is Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). 74 EDUCAUSE review November/December 2008 © 2008 Clifford Lynch Illustration by Gemma Robbinson, © 2008 When we speak of the changes wrought digitizing the contents of cultural memory tors, very high-end supercomputers) into by information technology, we consider organizations such as libraries, archives, cyberinfrastructure components that information technology in its broadest and museums worldwide. There are simi- can be shared by researchers around the sense: not only high-performance com- lar but less ambitious programs to import world. Again, this is only natural, since the puting and advanced computer communi- reference and evidentiary collections into national support organizations fund these cation networks but also sophisticated ob- the cyberinfrastructure for the sciences: very expensive resources and are eager servational and experimental devices and biodiversity and taxonomic collections, to see their value and utility maximized sensor arrays attached to the network, as materials from natural history museums, within the scientific community. And of well as software-driven technologies such printed collections of historical scientific course the funding organizations are very as high-performance data management, observations from archives, the histori- interested in advancing the development data analysis, mining and visualization, cal corpus of scientific literature, and the and deployment of services and tools collaboration tools and environments, and like.5 that will be helpful to large numbers of large-scale simulation and modeling sys- investigators spread across many different tems. Content, in the form of reusable and National and Campus Perspectives institutions and disciplines. Of particular often very large datasets and databases— on Cyberinfrastructure Deployment interest are systems that facilitate the shar- numeric, textual, visual—is an integral part Until recently, much of the articulation ing and reuse of data or that allow more of advanced information technology also. of the nature of cyberinfrastructure and active collaboration among geographically Even the new collaborative social struc- the programs to implement it has come scattered scientists. tures enabled by information technology from visionaries such as Dan Atkins (who Characterizing the shape of the na- might themselves be considered a part of recently completed a two-year term as tional strategies for the development and the technology base in a broad sense. the Director of the Office of Cyberin- deployment of humanities cyberinfra- In thinking about how best to support frastructure at the U.S. National Science structure is more difficult. Humanities the changes in scholarly and scientific Foundation) and Tony Hey (who formerly research, at least in the United States, is work and also to accelerate these changes served as the head of the e-Science Pro- much less dependent on centralized fund- as a way of advancing scientific progress, gramme in the United Kingdom) speaking ing from a few government agencies such How does the campus cyberinfrastructure challenge differ from the national cyberinfrastructure challenge? science funding agencies began speaking in the context of national-level science as the National Science Foundation or about the need to systematically invest in programs. Naturally, they have tended to the National Institutes of Health. Funders what they called cyberinfrastructure. This in- focus on the need for cyberinfrastructure such as the Andrew W. Mellon Founda- cluded not just the information technolo- to support large-scale national and inter- tion or the National Endowment for the gies already mentioned but additionally national scientific projects and programs.6 Humanities have thus far financed mostly the human and organizational resources Indeed, one characteristic of many of isolated exploratory projects, and the needed to facilitate services and activi- these large projects is that they are cross- resources available for humanities cyber- ties such as the training and retraining of institutional and have sufficient scale to infrastructure support are limited. In the scholars, the management and operation include expertise on relevant informa- United States, the Institute of Museum and of the technical facilities that make up tion technology and data and information Library Studies (IMLS) has funded some the IT environment and the scholarly management as an organic part of the proj- substantial digitization programs, and in tools that have been integrated with it, ect team, rather than simply functioning as the United Kingdom, the Joint Informa- and the performance of data curation and a client of some campus-based service. In tion Systems Committee (JISC), along with preservation. As humanists subsequently many cases, these large projects have also other government organizations, has made explored how to adapt the idea of cyber- been assisted by national-scale support some substantial investments in digitiza- infrastructure to their own disciplinary organizations (such as Internet2), which tion of key scholarly resources. However, needs, they also articulated the need for as have helped with intercampus technology with the growing interest in more system- much of the human record—expressed in coordination. atic infrastructure building, the landscape text, images, sound and video recordings, The national and international cyberin- here is likely to change substantially in the and digital surrogates of cultural artifacts— frastructure implementation planning has next few years. Project Bamboo (http:// as possible to be available in digital form, also tended to focus on making unique or projectbamboo.org), supported by the along with tools to facilitate the study and near-unique scientific resources (e.g., data- Mellon Foundation and currently in the analysis of this corpus, thus implying a bases, telescopes, electron microscopes, planning-grant phase, is particularly inter- very large and open-ended program of undersea sensor arrays, particle accelera- esting, since it seems focused on building 76 EDUCAUSE review November/December 2008 campus cyberinfrastructure capability— modated by basic campus-provided net- including organizational support pro- work connectivity. Thus there is a need to grams for scholars—for the humanities at plan for the design, development, deploy- participating institutions rather than on ment, and support of cyberinfrastructure building pieces of national cyberinfrastruc- in determining and learning how to do components that are intended primarily to ture resources for humanists everywhere this (simply providing access to services support common local needs, including or on simply funding exemplar projects by isn’t enough). This includes scholars who the needs of the campus community to small groups of humanists. typically do not receive grants and whose reach and work with popular, widely used How does the campus cyberinfrastruc- disciplines get little or no national fund- national and international cyberinfrastructure challenge differ from the national cy- ing support and who cannot pay for or ture components and services. One of the berinfrastructure challenge, recognizing compete for resource allocations at the key challenges—politically, financially, that investments in these areas should be national level. And it particularly includes and technically—is defining the demarca- not just complementary but mutually re- individual scholars or groups of scholars tion between free universal service and inforcing? First, there is a strong obligation who cannot afford dedicated specialist

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