0.21 Recommendations  (Page 5/11)

4.cultivate leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the humanities and social sciences.

Addressed to: Senior scholars; scholarly societies; university administrators; senior research librariansand research library organizations; academic publishing organizations; federal funding agencies; private foundations

Implementation: Increase federal and foundation funding to one or more scholarly organizations in thearea of humanities and social science computing so that they can work with member organizations of the American Council of LearnedSocieties (ACLS) and others to establish priorities for cyberinfrastructure development, raise awareness of research andpartnership opportunities among scholars, and coordinate the evolution of research products from basic to applied.

Librarians, rather than scholars, have provided much of the recent leadership within the academy on issuesof cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences. Reflecting the conservative culture of scholarship, some scholarshave questioned librarians’ investments in building digital collections and acquiring online resources. Given that the libraryconstitutes the historic infrastructure of scholarship, it is entirely appropriate that librarians have sought to re-ignitescholarly engagement with infrastructural issues. Nevertheless, others now need to take up the cause and shoulder their leadershipresponsibilities. As the task force of the American Association of Universities indicated in its 2004 report Reinvigorating theHumanities, “[u]niversity presidents, provosts and humanitiesdeans” must “support the development and use of digital information and technology in the humanities.”

Leadership requires structure. Humanities organizations, in particular, should develop new means of sharinginformation and setting agendas. Again, the example of the library community is instructive. The Association of Research Libraries(ARL); Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); and Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is about to absorb theResearch Libraries Group, have made technological transformation central to their missions and programming. They have, in turn,created vehicles—the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, the Scholarly Publishing and AcademicResources Coalition—dedicated entirely to providing leadership on these issues. Very few cognate efforts exist in the humanities andsocial sciences. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), H-Net, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and TechnologyAdvanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) are three examples, but these have not enjoyed the kind of financial support from the humanities andsocial sciences communities that ARL, CLIR, OCLC, or RLG have received from the research library community. Scholarly societieshave a special role to play in providing—and funding—similar leadership for scholars in the humanities and socialsciences.