IL2006: Tuesday Keynote

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition of Networked Information
Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure & Choices for Libraries
9:00-9:45am

• Will not be doing a musical performance this morning
• Observations about scholarship/teaching/learning are changing & implications of policy changes
• What do these changes open up for librarians?
• Cyberinfrastructure
• most of rest of the world you can talk to people about e-science
• practice of science has been transformed by
• high performance computation
• high performance networking
• large scalle management/org/reuse of data
• 2002 report, Atkins commission, how is science & engineering in the US changing
• what changes need to be made?
• "cyberinfrastructure"
• data management
• data visualization
• people!
• National Virtual Observatories
• People not interested in IP issues w/ astronomy
• metadata is free/bulit-in to observational equipment
• enormous sky sruveys patch together from many different sources
• no longer about getting observational time
• algorhythms are being written to analyze data instead of needing more observational data
• opens up astronomy to school kids
• [I read about the democratization of astronomy in The Long Tail last night...]
• how do we get data resued and preserved?
• how do we assist the scientists to mark this data consistently?
• first focused on engineering
• all of this technology can also be applied to the humanities and the social sciences
• american council of learned societies report coming out soon on this issue
• these approaches need to be used in not just the hard sciences
• there are controversies about whether these technologies are changing the way humanites are studied
• "phisics changes one funeral at a time"
• questions
• human subjects
• privacy
• intellectual property
• access to evidence
• Could we digitize all the literature of all the cultures that have ever existed? Images?
• Mass digitization projects
• Microsoft
• Google
• European Digital Library
• What about the "non-published" stuff? (Museums)
• what are the roles and responsibilites of museums of publically stored materials?
• Most stuff is pre-1923 / out of copyright
• they're monitizing those items
• seems inappropriate to some
• "public trust"
• digitize materials to make them available to the society at large
• Special collections
• papers of persons and institutions
• important to researchers
• collections are changing in character / going digital
• Salman Rushdie's papers & e-mail
• items are being created in digital form
• Problem of scale
• study of older times, there's a paucity of evidence
• modern times, too much information
• What's coming out of this
• needs are shifting from getting the tech to work to informatics
• organize data
• backup data
• confidentiality
• tend to focus on big projects
• large projects
• large teams
• highly organized
• big $
• what about the projects with small groups working on small issues
• small staff
• small $
• how we support these people
• deal with on a diciplinary basis or institutional basis?
• Will end up with a patchwork of solutions to this problem
• will be dynamic not static
• fashions, interests and budgets wax & wane
• Roles of libraries in all this
• big research universities & info tech workforce 15yrs ago vs now
• then: worked for central IT
• now: more than half now in departments, schools, labs, etc. / closer to researchers & teachers
• facing demands for data curration
• more want to share & reuse data
• shifting norms re: information sxchange
• retiring faculty / what to do with all this data i've accumulated?
• institutions finding that there's "value" to the data
• data mgt & sharing plan in grant proposals
• how will it be preserved
• how will it be shared
• institutions making sure that these rules are adhered to
• data lost in gulf disasters of last year
• was there backups?
• ACRL report on all this due out soon
• who's supposed to be doing the work?
• new professional
• mythological
• "data scientist"
• what do these people need to know
• general?
• diciplinary?
• can we do this for each dicipline or more generalists or hybrid
• major workforce issues
• sale of problem is large
• we're going to need a lot of people to work on this
• are these people librarians?
• libraries as institutions
• big research libraries
• most profoundly changed already
• strugging to keep up w/ amount of data via budgets
• access issues
• main role has been to apy for journals
• journals now electronic
• access has shifted out of the library
• some people therefore believe access to these sources is free
• policy choices?
• already overstressed, can't deal with it
• humanities strategy, hard sciences are on their own
• need to move resource away from published lit & into more active engagement with the scholarly process
• three very different pathways
• different institutions will take different paths
• movement into more inter-institutional collaboration
• rapid rise of virtual organizations
• cross multiple boundaries
• other libraries
• huge demand for access
• will see in many different areas
• undergrads
• k-12
• will effect many libraries
• Nature of personal history is changing
• issue for any cultural memory orgainzation, not just libraries
• scope of those interests are getting broader
• rise of amature observational science
• bottany
• astronomy
• biology
• geology
• libraries of all types need to be mindful of all the changes this type of research is bringing
• will force strategic change