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Cyberinfrastructure and Scholarly Communication
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A public lecture by John Unsworth
co-sponsored by the Brown University Library and Computing and Information Services:
3:00 pm, Monday, May 9, 2005
Smith-Buonanno 201
“Infrastructure…refers collectively to the roads, power grids, telephone systems, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy to function…The newer term cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy.” (Report of the National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure)
Traditionally, the library has been the shared infrastructure of the humanities and social sciences. Today, shared infrastructure needs to include not only the library, but also archives and museums, and it needs to reintegrate these repositories of the cultural record, as it reintegrates the academic disciplines devoted to it, and reconnects the academy with the public.
This talk will extend the discussion of cyberinfrastructure’s technical, content, and policy issues into essential areas that have been served less well than the sciences and technology, particularly the humanities and the social sciences, which are expanding their research horizons via information technologies to create large collections of complex digital objects and to develop computational methods. Computational power and new digital tools are being applied to such age-old problems as deciphering ancient languages, recording multiple layers of archeological sites in ways that enable new interrogations of data while protecting the authenticity of the record, and, through GIS, enabling place-based research in collections as diverse as historical maps of land ownership and biological specimen collections. Cyberinfrastructure also presents the opportunity, in these disciplines as in others, for
global-scale collaboration among domain specialists and the potential for advancing both research and teaching.
John Unsworth is the Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Formerly the Director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, he has served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and Chair of the Text
Encoding Initiative Consortium. He currently chairs the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
For further information contact: Patrick_Yott@brown.edu -
Wireless Access Now at John Hay Library
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The John Hay Library now has wireless access in the following locations.
Reading Room
University Archives
Lobby area and extending out to the front road
Lownes Room
Bruhn RoomThe Libraries are the top location where people access wireless on campus. UCS and CIS has been conducting a survey on wireless services on campus. They received about 1350 responses. Of the respondents, about 75% indicated they had laptops with wireless capability, and about 55% of the respondents said they do use Wireless on campus. In the question about where they typically connect to wireless, the top locations fell out like this:
Libraries — 37.97%
CIT — 12.89%
Faunce — 11.41%
Blue room — 6.21%
Main green — 5.82%For more information contact Mark_Shelton@brown.edu
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LibQual+ Survey
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From April 4-27, 2005, the Brown University Library is conducting a web-based survey of faculty and students
to measure the quality of the Library’s service. LibQUAL+ is part of a suite of services offered by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to help libraries assess and improve services to users. The survey itself is based on the SERVQUAL instrument, a popular tool for assessing service quality in the private sector, and was modified for the library setting through extensive research conducted at the Texas A&M University Libraries (supported in part by a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education). A total of 234 institutions, including some of the largest research libraries in North America, are participating in the spring 2005 LibQUAL+ survey.
On April 4, email messages were sent to all teaching faculty, all graduate and medical students, and all undergraduate students, inviting them to partici pate in the LibQUAL+ survey. This email included a link to the survey form on the web. More information about the LibQUAL+ survey is available at the LibQUAL+ web site from the Association of Research Libraries.
For further information contact Raynna Bowlby in the Office of the University Librarian at Raynna_Bowlby@brown.edu.