Digital Content and Cyberinfrastructure

About

Funding agencies like the National Science Foundation are at an important juncture in defining policy and program development for cyberinfrastructure investment. This talk will consider whether digital content qualifies as infrastructure under certain conditions and what levels of investment are appropriate. Scholarly domain communities and professional associations and Academy interest groups are debating what criteria might be applied.

Historically, the USA Federal funding agencies have used narrow and restricted definitions of information / knowledge infrastructure: primarily focusing on computing and communications hardware systems, and more recently, networking middleware and scientific databases. Digital libraries research has reframed perspectives and dramatically broadened the IT applications spectrum. Innovative interdisciplinary applications in non-science, content-rich domains such as the arts, humanities and cultural heritage informatics are proving to pose altogether new and greater challenges for IT research and cyberinfrasture development than have been encountered in computational science applications.

This talk will highlight the historic context of the present circumstances and demonstrate, using examples, new tools for discovery created as a result of developments in digital libraries research.