0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 4/13)

Utilities that service, as in power

We also tend to think of less visible services like electricity and water as infrastructure. Obviously the transmission lines, the water mains, and the sewers are infrastructure in the sense of what is between, but they are not between individuals. They are between us and service providers and generally include the generating stations and the sewage plants. The infrastructure really is the service that provides electricity, provides water and disposes our waste.

While we can’t imagine civilization without roads of some sort, we can imagine alternatives to government provision of services like power and water. Roads by definition have to be shared to connect. Utilities don’t need to be shared and are thus more likely to be privatized, though there still seems to be an obvious efficiency in maintaining one power grid and one water/sewage system. We could each dispose of our own sewage, generate our own electricity and get our own water, but these functions are better provided as services on a large and efficient scale. The question with such utilities is at what scale and how should regional utilities interoperate.

Services as infrastructure serve as a second paradigm for research infrastructure, though a more complicated one. There are a number of computing services that we have come to expect as infrastructure beyond the provision of the physical Internet. There are the services like DNS that are needed to make the Internet work; there are the services like e-mail that work over the Internet that we have also come to expect; and there are services like digital libraries that are more efficiently provided centrally, but have not become expectations yet. We can think of a digital library or data service as a utility infrastructure that fuels research rather than as the virtual reflection of the Library as building. Just as our machines need electricity, so our minds need information. Just as library services are a form of expected research infrastructure, so digital library services make sense as research infrastructure.

Much of the turn towards cyberinfrastructure focuses on the development of these large information services. The age of small research projects developing scholarly electronic editions is passing. We can all see the value of shifting from individual editor-run projects maintaining information services to a model where research data services are managed as infrastructure with centralized providers and a professional staff dedicated to the infrastructure. That would let researchers move on, just as they do after publishing a monograph. We expect publishers and libraries to maintain our scholarship after the research, so why not have equivalent service infrastructure to maintain our virtual scholarship?

That we don’t have national digital research data/text archives or libraries despite the decades of development is one of the hurdles that might explain the turn to infrastructure, though I worry the time may have passed for such a utility, as it may be perceived as unnecessary given large-scale commercial services like Google Books. For a sustained discussion of digital library (DL) developments and infrastructure, see Carl Jay Lagoze’s dissertation on Lost Identity: The Assimilation of Digital Libraries into the Web .