library role in e-research infrastructure

Lots of great info fed to me through comments.  Based on that input, I have linked to several articles and websites below.

Here's another way to slice the research library discussion: I am mainly interested in technology-mediated e-Research activities.  That may be patrons connecting directly to library technology services, or other bits of technology connecting to library tech services (e.g. scientific application connecting to library data services).  This is mainly an e-Science library type of discussion.  I have suggested some ideas about roles librarians might play in supporting these types of systems, but there hasn't been much expressed librarian interest (e.g. I haven't heard "yay, I will become a Data Curator!")

There is a completely separate discussion, which is probably one of the main discussions in the library blogosphere: how can technology be leveraged to enhance the existing human-mediated role of librarians in communicating with their patrons.  (The existing role being in my understanding: patron asks questions, librarians provide answers.)  I guess it also hinges on different definitions of transformative.  To me, replacing a printed library newsletter with a blog is incremental, a part of improving existing processes, it's not deeply transformatory.

Anyway, I just wanted to surface the idea of these two different discussions, both of which involve library technology, but from dramatically different perspectives (e-Science infrastructure vs patron engagement).

Since I'm not a librarian, I am more interested in the e-Science bits than the patron stuff.

Lorcan Dempsey points me to some interesting Ariadne articles related to the e-Science and Digital Library topics.

Clifford Lynch presents a comparison Research Libraries Engage the Digital World: A US-UK Comparative Examination of Recent History and Future Prospects.

The central argument here is that, over the past decade in the Higher Education and research sphere, we have seen several large-scale technological shifts, with all of the accompanying organisational, social and cultural changes, proceeding largely independently - the transformations of scholarly practice, of teaching and learning, of scholarly communication, and of 'traditional' research library services. In particular, the resulting transformation of traditional research library services is not necessarily well matched to the range of needs presented by the other transformations. ...

Infrastructure and Support Needs for the New Educational and Research Enterprise

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There is an insightful and important arc of research on the connection of library and information services to the changing demands and practices of research - see [10] for one set of perspectives, and some of Lorcan Dempsey's excellent recent thinking about 'networkflows' (a classic Dempsey punning coinage) (see for example, [22]) recently refocusing attention on this in a more pragmatic way . Interestingly, Dempsey points not just at the intensively-discussed issue of changing practices of scholarship that I've emphasised here, but also at the emergence in the UK and elsewhere, in response to research assessment and funding practices, of 'research support systems' which help to automate support for the administrative workflows imposed on academic departments by these developments.

And there is much more that is relevant: studies about data curation and preservation needs (for example, [23]); studies of faculty informatics needs and practices [24]; studies of disciplinary data sharing, deposit, and reuse norms and practices; studies of changing practices of scholarly authoring (see, for example, the work of Peter Murray-Rust in Chemistry or the work of Ed Ayers and Will Thomas in History); and studies of how institutional repositories are being used (see, for instance [25] [26] [27] to name but a few).

...

Conclusions

... We are in the middle of a very large-scale shift. The nature of that shift is that we are at last building a real linkage between research libraries and the new processes of scholarly communication and scholarly practice, as opposed to just repackaging existing products and services of the traditional scholarly publishing system and the historic research library. In this shift we have left the debate about digital libraries behind, recognising this now as simply shorthand for just one set of technologies and systems among many that are likely to be important.

Thinking about infrastructure for the practice of scholarship, the conduct of science, teaching and learning, management of the intellectual and cultural record; thinking about workflow - or, to use Dempsey's term, 'networkflow' -- as all of these activities are increasingly facilitated by the networked information environment: these are the ways forward to understanding the future of research libraries in Higher Education over the next decade.

Lorcan also has an article of his own: The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After.

In a comment on one of my Librarians and Coders posts, Dr. Mohamed Taher also points me to the collection of ideas he has put together at Librarians and Techies - A NEXUS.

Blog administrivia: I have added more postings from my Technology Foresight category into my new Academic Library Future category; there are now 31 postings in the latter category.  I am also working on the long-overdue task of cleaning up (adding more links and categories to) my InfoGrid 2005 conference  presentation reports.  The InfoGrid 2005 conference had an excellent focus on the methodologies and technologies that libraries need to support advanced e-Science activities (specifically Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services, and Shibboleth distributed authentication).

Since they tell me there will be no InfoGrid conference this year, can anyone recommend similar conferences covering these topics?