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

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

Christine L. Borgman

Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of online information, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure for distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid to the new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is the underlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarly enterprise. 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 scholarly research in the twenty-first century.

Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending "data deluge" exists comparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, 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 interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment.

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

Table of Contents

Detailed Contents - ix
[http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip075/2006036057.html]
Preface - xvii
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262026198pref1.pdf]
Acknowledgments - xxi
1 Scholarship at a Crossroads - 1
2 Building the Scholarly Infrastructure -13
3 Embedded Everywhere - 33
4 The Continuity of Scholarly Communication -47
5 The Discontinuity of Scholarly Publishing - 75
6 Data: The Input and Output of Scholarship - 115
7 Building an Infrastructure for Information - 149
8 Disciplines, Documents, and Data - 179
9 The View from Here - 227
References - 267
Index - 321
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262026198index1.pdf]

Publisher Site
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11333]

Interview

Inside Higher Ed / Nov. 14 2009 / ‘Scholarship in the Digital Age’

It’s hard to meet academics these days whose work hasn’t been changed by the Internet. But even if everyone knows that the world of scholarship has changed, it’s not always clear just how or the way those evolutions fit into the broad history of scholarship. Christine L. Borgman sets out to do just that in Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet, just published by MIT Press.

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/14/borgman]

Columbia University / Scholarly Communication Program / Research without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication / March 24 2009 / A-V / [Posted 04-10-09]

[http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/scholarship-digital-age-information-infrastructure-and-i]

Slides [In PDF]

[http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/files/BorgmanColumbia20090324.pdf]