Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet

Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of onlineinformation, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure fordistributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid tothe new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is theunderlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarlyenterprise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social,legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarlyresearch in the twenty-first century. Borgman describes the roles that information technology playsat every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with therelatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals,books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending "data deluge" existscomparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences,and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In theprocess, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure--scholars, publishers,libraries, funding agencies, and others--to look beyond their own domains to address the interactionof technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in theDigital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robustscholarly environment.

Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair inInformation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of FromGutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World(MIT Press, 2000).