0.20 Necessary characteristics

Necessary characteristics

An effective and trustworthy cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences willhave the following characteristics:

1. it will be accessible as a public good.

We have argued that digital information has an inherently democratizing power—but that power can be unleashed onlyif access to the cultural record is as open as possible, in both intellectual and economic terms, to the public. On the one hand,the Web has made a great deal of human knowledge available for free: with its nine million items, the Library of Congress’sAmerican Memory program is but one example. On the other hand, commercial entities have taken an increasingly prominent role bothin digitizing public-domain cultural heritage and in digitizing cultural heritage materials still under copyright; thesecollections are often only available to organizations (such as major research libraries) able to pay substantial subscription orlicense fees. If public funds are involved in the creation of a digital resource, proportional elements of those resources shouldbe freely available to the public.

2. it will be sustainable.

Sustainability is often thought of as primarily a financial issue: how will a project persist afterstart-up funding is spent? The digital transformation has raised questions about how to finance research, scholarly communication,and preservation that previously were obscured by the practices of libraries and university presses. Many humanists may have firstencountered the concept of sustainability in discussions with potential funders of digital projects. As Diane M. Zorich noted in2003, we need to avoid treating digital initiatives “as ‘special projects’ rather than as long-term programs.”

3. it will provide interoperability.

Access to data should be seamless across repositories. This will require standards-based tools and metadatathat ensure interoperability and enable use for a variety of purposes. Cyberinfrastructure must be designed to be open, modular,and easily adaptable to new technologies so that the pursuit of interoperability does not become a source of delay and constraint.It must also be built to foster and support knowledge communities, which themselves must include information professionals whounderstand the standards issues. As NSF director Ardent L. Bement, Jr., observes, “with today’s electrical grid. . . my neighbor and Ican use different appliances to meet our individual needs; as long as the appliances conform to certain electrical standards, theywill work reliably,” and a sufficiently advanced cyberinfrastructure will work similarly: researchers will have“easy access to the computing, communication, and information resources they need, while pursuing different avenues of interestusing different tools.”

4. it will facilitate collaboration.

Digital technology favors openness and collaboration. Defining and building cyberinfrastructure should bea collaborative undertaking involving the humanities and social sciences communities in the broadest sense. It is equally importantthat the cyberinfrastructure be designed to foster and support collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries andto bring new perspectives to bear on the exploration of the cultural record. Collaboration will be especially important asinstitutions of higher education seek to preserve and archive digital materials. Digital preservation will require leveragingtalent, resources, and commitment in the academy, in the commercial sector, and in government. Each sector has already made significantcontributions, each has a leadership role to play, and each needs to be further involved in the curation of our culturalheritage.

5. it will support experimentation.

Although cyberinfrastructure itself should be stable and reliable, it will need to support ongoingexperimentation, and it will need to evolve. Researchers in the social sciences and humanities will need to experiment, and thatexperimentation will be crucial to bringing change to those disciplines. Institutions must encourage risk-taking by creatingframeworks through which junior scholars and students are rewarded for ambitious research programs. Offering this encouragement meansproviding laboratories, postdoctoral grants, and other support that allows these research programs to be worked out and criticallyassessed. Institutions also need to allow their libraries and university presses to experiment and take chances in order to findmore successful models of scholarly communication. It is important to foster a culture of experimentation by underwriting explicitmechanisms and traditions for capturing and sharing the lessons learned through innovation. True experimentation always carrieswith it the possibility of failure, as the necessary price for success, yet informative failures are essential to moving forwardinto the unknown, and they should be reported without prejudice and duly valued on that account.