CLIR cyberinfrastructure short articles

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has a publication which I guess is called CLIR Issues, some recent... issues it has covered in its... issues include:

• Digital Scholarship: What's All the Fuss?
  by Stephen Nichols
• Cyberinfrastructure: It's All about Sharing
  by Amy Friedlander
• As We May Rethink
  by Chuck Henry

here's a section from "As We May Rethink":

The new cyberinfrastructure calls into question many of the methods and procedures with which we have worked for the past two decades. We have become comfortable with the technology, and execute much of our work using familiar applications on indispensable machines. CI is, in essence, an environment that facilitates sharing of data on an unprecedented scale, which in turn implies a far greater degree of federation, aggregation, and interoperable capabilities than we have heretofore experienced. It demands new kinds of expertise, which will require new forms of training and mentoring to recognize and respond to changing research behaviors. While the transformational potential of CI on higher education is not difficult to intuit, the details of this transformation have yet to be defined, and remain ambiguous.

It is precisely this ambiguity that allows us to explore the multiple possibilities of developing a functional and robust cyberinfrastructure and to create this new environment in the most flexible and nuanced fashion possible. Succeeding in the evolving CI will require that we thoroughly rethink our procedures and expectations on the technical as well as the social levels, for the technical and social are deeply interrelated in cyberinfrastructure.

Consider, for example, the sheer enormity of data to be supported. Many of the vast data sets are relatively new—not only in the humanities, with its large full-text and video databases, but also in astronomy and particle physics. Challenges such as data mining, semantic searches, multimedia data stewardship, and interoperability are common to all disciplines. This suggests that forward-looking researchers and scholars will need to exchange ideas and CI requirements for their mutual benefit.

There is little precedent for this kind of interdisciplinary dialogue. Past practice, characterized by a focus on traditional disciplinary purviews, silos of funded projects, and poor communication among researchers across intellectual boundaries, is at odds with the conceptual underpinnings of CI. In this respect, the past should not be prologue: our traditional methods of doing business and conducting research, as well as our systems of professional advancement, may undermine our best intentions unless we recognize the limitations of the academic procedures that have brought us to a point of new awareness.