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).