http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0003.115
In his lively and engaging history of the Western university, , William Clark traces the tension between traditional, rational, and charismatic authority in the evolving concept of institutions of higher education. Not surprisingly, the universities studied (more accurately university systems, categorized by national origins) tend to be highly conservative. The earlier, traditional university would hire a professor “who would reproduce not a group in the first instance, but a system” (17). Charismatic authority, on the other hand, was often embodied by individuals, which in a traditional university would be construed as challenging and disruptive. One arc of Clark’s narrative history is to show how, “as vested in clothing, books, furniture, titles, and so on, charisma at the traditional university served to uphold authority by sanctifying traditions and differentiating academics as a group from other groups in society. The traditional university resisted the charismatic individual for the sake of a charismatic collective. And when an Ockham or a Descartes appeared on the scene, the effects mirrored those of successful prophets or revolutionaries. The strength of the modern university consists in its ability to rationalize and routinize such prophecy and revolution, to make equilibrium dynamic” (18).
The widespread availability of digital content creates opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from those represented in traditional scholarly literature. To capitalize on these opportunities, digital content must routinely be collected, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly more rigorous than conventional methods. A new form of infrastructure is required to ensure that digital content, including research products and primary sources, is readily available, accessible, and usable.
In April 2007, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the British Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) held an invitational workshop on data-driven science and data-driven scholarship, co-chaired by Ronald Larsen and William Arms, who jointly authored the final report. The report used the term the workshop and its conclusions. In this article, William Arms gives a personal view of the motivation behind the workshop and the roles of libraries and publishing in achieving its goals.
Ask people how medieval books were written, and they’ll likely describe a scenario something like this: a lone monk sits in the library—the scriptorium—of his monastery, laboriously copying a text onto parchment. Every now and then he’ll stop to warm his fingers over the candle burning on top of his desk. That’s the romantic image of how these beautiful texts took shape. The truth is more dynamic. To perform the painstaking steps needed to make a manuscript, teams of people actually worked together in the cramped quarters of a stationer’s shop.
Current interest in cyberinfrastructure, a shared set of advanced computational and network resources to support scholarship, reflects both the advances that have been achieved and those that are likely to be possible as a result of the continued application of advanced computing technologies to fundamental questions in science and engineering. An important dimension of this effort has been the need for collaboration in addressing the scope and complexity of science and engineering research questions (Galison & Hevly, 1992). Increasingly, these collaborations transcend laboratory, disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries (Birnholtz, 2005; Finholt, 2003; Nentwich, 2003). This is due to three primary factors. First, many important research problems, such as understanding the relationship between public health policy and disease transmission/prevention, require expertise from multiple disciplines in order to reach creative and effective solutions. Second, even within disciplines it is increasingly necessary to share data and methods across levels of analysis and scale. And third, research apparatuses have increased substantially in size and cost, meaning that equipment must be shared among individual researchers or located in specialized facilities that may be independent of traditional university laboratories.
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Increasingly, the lifeblood of the academic institution—teaching and learning resources, academic records, and intellectual output of faculty, students, and staff—is created or accessed in digital form. The volume of such information continues to grow exponentially. Its proliferation, combined with its importance to the institutional mission, has raised urgent questions: How are digital assets being kept, and who is responsible for them? Where are digital objects going? If a college or university has not begun to address these questions, it is likely to do so soon.
Although many new forms of scholarly exchange have reached an advanced state of adoption, scholars and researchers generally remain remarkably naïve and uninformed about many issues involved with change in scholarly publishing and scholarly communication broadly. It is increasingly important that dialogue at research institutions involve a much wider group of researchers and scholars. Only active engagement by those undertaking research and scholarship can ensure that the advancement of research and scholarship takes priority in the development and adoption of new models. Research libraries have led in educating stakeholders about new models and are expanding their outreach to campus communities. In considering the effects of recent change, and looking to emerging trends and concerns, six dangers of the current moment are considered along with six topics ripe for campus dialogue.
Despite the image of the solitary individual at the bench or desk, scientific research — and research in general — is a process of communication as well as investigation and discovery. It is actually intensely social. Thomas Edison is credited by some with having invented the industrial laboratory in the 1870s and 1880s when he hired talented scientists to work on problems of electricity and engineering at his northern New Jersey labs.
The irrepressible progress of the open access movement means that every new year is richer than the last. At some point the thicket of new developments will make it impossible to write an annual review that does justice to the full range of activity. As I wrote this year's review, the fifth since I started the series in 2003, I kept thinking that the point had come in 2006.
The Virtual Observatory at Johns Hopkins University is a quintessential cyberinfrastructure project. Its objective is to support new science by greatly enhancing access to data and computing resources, providing a “virtual sky” and making it possible for astronomical researchers to find, retrieve, and analyze astronomical data from ground- and space-based telescopes worldwide.
Shortly after Amy Friedlander was named director of programs of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) last April, we asked her to be a ).