Category: New Librarianship

Jeffrey M Stanton, Elizabeth D Liddy, Derrick Cogburn, Megan Oakleaf, and R. David Lankes are co-PI’s on a new NSF grants entitled: CI-Facilitators: Information Architects across the STEM Disciplines. Paul Gandel, SU’s CIO also deserves a large portion of the credit for the grant.

What does this have to do with participatory librarianship? Well, read the description:

Cyber-Infrastructure – broadly defined to include the web, wireless grids, parallel processors, lap-tops, cell phones, mainframes, telecommunication networks, etc – has become the informational substrate of most dynamic enterprises. Databases, statistical datasets, data ware-houses, sample libraries, and image collections are just a few of the myriad examples of massive scale information collections that e-researchers dependent on information must create, maintain, and share In addition, some of the most innovative information use is now in the form of collaboration technology that facilitates the development of geographically distributed sites and networked communities within and across traditional divides.

Yet in e-research scholars have three serious problems facing them. First, researchers spend their careers mastering the skills, knowledge, and tools that comprise the core of their respective disciplines. Few among them have the capacity to simultaneously become experts in information management, networking, virtual or distributed collaboration, search and retrieval, archiving, user interface development, and all of the other skills of the information professions. Second, advances and convergences in Cyber-Infrastructure that have occurred over recent decades have themselves fueled a vast proliferation of information – more findings, more datasets, more papers, more conferences, more journals, more books and so on. Even the brightest and most motivated struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of knowledge creation in their field. Finally, information infrastructure itself is in the process of an accelerating evolution. Gains in computing power, storage, transmission bandwidth and other fundamental building blocks of Cyber-Infrastructure create frequent discontinuities in the economics of information technologies, while open source software tools sprawl daily into innovative new application territories. The rapid pace of development of information infrastructure implies that only individuals who dedicate their professional lives to it can truly keep up.

One solution to these issues is the preparation of “cyber-infrastructure facilitators.” These are information professionals able to partner with e-research teams to identify extant data and tools, as well as build new tools in the pursuit of research topics.

Sounds like a good participatory librarian working in the digital world to me.