Please join us on Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 3:30 pm in 432 Computer
Science Building for a guest lecture by Christine L. Borgman, Professor
& Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles.

ABSTRACT:
Scholars in all fields are taking advantage of new sources of data and
new means to publish and distribute their work online. Content in
digital form, whether data from embedded sensor networks or text from
digitized books, can be mined to ask new questions, in new ways.
Research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, distributed,
collaborative, and information-intensive. However, the practices,
products, and sources of data vary widely between disciplines. Some
fields are more advantaged than others by the array of content now
online and by the tools and services available to use it. As readers,
scientists have access to the greatest depth of their literature online,
but their use is most concentrated on recent publications. Conversely,
humanists’ reading habits cover the longest time span of publications,
yet they have the least depth of coverage online. As researchers,
scientists generate most of the data they use, while humanists draw
heavily on cultural artifacts and other sources that they neither own
nor control. Social scientists occupy the midpoint on both of these
dimensions.

Implicit in policy statements for e-Science, e-Research, and
cyberinfrastructure is the assumption that much of the content layer of
the scholarly information infrastructure will be constructed through
voluntary, and in some cases mandatory, contributions of documents and
data by individual scholars. Self-archiving, institutional
repositories, data repositories, and most forms of open access
publishing rest on these assumptions. A close examination of scholarly
practices reveals that more disincentives than incentives exist to
contribute documents and data for the general good. Scholars in all
fields are rewarded for publishing; few are rewarded for managing
information. They balance cooperation and competition in complex ways
that vary by type and source of data, temporal factors, effort involved
in documentation, recognition and reputation, ownership and control of
content, and other considerations. These factors interact differently
within each discipline. Scholars continue to rely on the scholarly
publishing system to assure that the products of their work are
legitimized, disseminated, preserved, curated, and made accessible. No
comparable system exists for data. While individual contributions will
be important, the content layer will be built only by concerted
institutional and policy initiatives. Much is at stake in these
discussions, including the ethos of sharing and principles of open
science that underpin modern scholarship.

BIOGRAPHY:
Christine Borgman is Professor & Presidential Chair in Information
Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the
author of more than 150 publications in the fields of information
studies, computer science, and communication. Prof.Borgman’s research
interests and teaching areas include digital libraries, information
retrieval, electronic publishing, information-seeking behavior,
scientific data use and policy, scholarly communication, bibliometrics,
and information technology policy. Her book, From Gutenberg to the
Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked
World (MIT Press, 2000), won the Best Information Science Book of the
Year Award from the American Society for Information Science and
Technology. She will be speaking from her new book, Scholarship in the
Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, MIT Press
(September, 2007). A full biography and list of publications is
available on her website, http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/cborgman/

Current professional activities include membership on the U.S. National
CODATA (Committee on Data for Science and Technology) and Advisory Board
to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Prior service includes
membership on the Study Committee on Internet Navigation and the Domain
Name System (National Academies), Advisory Committee to the Computer,
Information Sciences, and Engineering Directorate of the National
Science Foundation, the Board of Directors of the Council on Library and
Information Resources, and the International Advisory Board to the Soros
Foundation Open Society Institute Regional Library Program. She is an
elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) and served as Chair of Section T, Information, Computing,
and Communication. Prof. Borgman was a visiting scholar at the Oxford
Internet Institute (University of Oxford, U.K.), Visiting Professor in
the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, U.K.,
Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Economic Sciences and
at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, and a
Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference
Center in Bellagio, Italy. She was Chair of the UCLA Department of
Library and Information Science (1995-1997).