Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (review)

Many reports in recent years have signalled the importance of creating a cyber-infrastructure to serve the new and varied needs of scholarship in the digital age. Much progress has already been made in building the technical components of this system, but less attention has been paid to what it is being built to do and whose needs it will serve. Before we get too far along with constructing the technical architecture, Christine Borgman believes, we should spend some time studying the modus operandi of scholars that this system is supposed to support. As she cautions early in her book, 'design decisions made today will determine whether the Internet of tomorrow enables imaginative new forms of scholarship and learning – or whether it simply reinforces today's tasks, practices, laws, business models, and incentives' (3).

A significant part of Scholarship in the Digital Age is therefore devoted to understanding how scholars operated in the older print environment, how they now operate in the mixed print/digital environment, and what the differences between the two can teach us about the demands that any cyber-infrastructure must meet. Chapter 8, 'Disciplines, Documents, and Data' (the longest chapter in the book at forty-eight pages), usefully maps out the differences among the sciences, social sciences, and humanities against the more general background provided by chapter 7, 'Building an Infrastructure for Information,' in which aspects of the scholarly communication system common to all are examined, such as its organization into disciplines, the nature and challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship, the role of collaboration and social networks, various temporal characteristics of scholars' use of publications, and the importance of 'tacit knowledge.' Here again Borgman emphasizes that 'to determine what infrastructure tools and services will be most useful, it is necessary to understand who the users are and how they conduct their research,' warning that 'the later in the systems design process . . . problems are identified, the more difficult they are to correct' (149).

For this reader – and probably for most people in scholarly publishing, who will be familiar with much of what the author has to say about the system of scholarly communication as it has operated in the past and operates today – the most informative and revelatory parts of this book have to do with what the author terms the 'data deluge.' We are all at least peripherally aware of the large-scale projects in astronomy, humane genome research, high-energy physics, and other scientific collaborations that produce massive collections of data capable of being analysed only with the aid of powerful supercomputers, and we have been exposed to the ways in which data-intensive investigations have begun to transform the social sciences and even the humanities, as in the Valley of the Shadow project on the American Civil War. What has not been evident to us hitherto, however, is how these developments might affect our own work as publishers and what role we might play in the future as these projects become ever more important to scholarship in their respective fields. Borgman's book should be required reading for all scholarly publishers who need to begin thinking about how data relate to documents and how the two combine in the process of publication and the advancement of knowledge.

Here are some of the developments Borgman asks us to consider:

The data deluge is affecting scholarship and learning in ways both subtle and profound. Producing great volumes of data is expensive, whether by scientific instruments or from national or international surveys. Larger teams of researchers are collaborating to produce these data sets. More funding agencies, journals, and conferences expect researchers to make their data available for others to mine. Sharing data is seen as a way to leverage investments in research, verify research findings, and accelerate the pace of research and development. In some fields, the data are coming to be viewed as an essential end...