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Editor's Notes
- #2 Good morning, and thank you for coming. My name is Dorothea Salo, and I work for the University of Wisconsin System as an odd sort of digital archivist. I do have strong interests in the area of cyberinfrastructure, as I hope to prove to you today, and so Melissa asked me to come here and talk to you a little bit about my angle on the whole cyberinfrastructure thing.And I promise you will understand the title by the time I’m done talking. Cross my heart.
- #3 So, when we say the word cyberinfrastructure, some of the first things that come to mind are grid computing, in which we throw a whole lot of little computers working together at huge, massive computational problems, and data mining, in which we throw those computing resources at huge amounts of data on a scale we could never have considered before.(CLICK) Of course, these processes create new data. Terabytes and petabytes of it. And now all the librarians listening to me are wincing, because our shock-and-awe sensors tripped as soon as you could fit the Library of Alexandria on a USB thumb drive, you know what I’m saying? (CLICK) And then the grid computing people start tossing around exabytes, and look, my brain just shuts down.(CLICK) In the UK, what we call cyberinfrastructure is often called “e-science.” This, of course, betrays an assumption. (CLICK) So we don’t use “e-science” here, because it’s not just the physicists and the astronomers and the climatologists; (CLICK) we say “e-research” instead, because it’s certainly true that the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities are joining the party too. And with that, we add concerns over collaboration, especially across institutions and across disciplines -- and doing cross-disciplinary collaboration creates sticky issues around identity and authorization and it all gets very evil and nasty and complicated very quickly.(CLICK) And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the data I mentioned. An emerging professional specialty, though exactly *where* it’s emerging is a really good question, is that of data curation. This brings up questions of metadata, a thing dear to librarian hearts that just made the IT professionals here cringe, and data standards. We have a few of those, in a few disciplines, but not nearly enough, and unstandardized, not-uniform data is something that I think we can all agree makes us ALL cringe!(CLICK) And then there’s the question of who’s going to do data curation. Is it an IT function? Are faculty responsible? After all, it’s their data! And what about those libraries?(CLICK) And by this time much screaming has ensued and much hair is being torn out. Not least because wow, that is one ugly, ugly slide.
- #5 Scholars are using computers, in a number of different form factors, including big old server racks like this one, in their research. This, I am sure, is not news to anyone!
- #6 All this computation produces data, sometimes as the point of the exercise, sometimes as a sort of side effect. Data takes all kinds of forms; it’s not just numbers. Word-clouds, scanned manuscripts, maps, images on wildly different scales -- it’s all bits-and-bytes; it’s all reusable and recomputable -- it’s all data!
- #7 This is in addition to the books and journals that librarians are familiar with and already care for.Interestingly, as these materials move digital themselves (CLICK), they too can be treated as data, as grist for the computational mill. This doesn’t happen as much as it should, honestly, and the reason for that is that even when these materials are digital, they’re locked up behind pay-access firewalls to protect the current scholarly-publishing business model, so the computers can’t get in to crunch on them. This is a major argument for open access to the literature -- and for those of you who know me and what I do, I hereby reassure you that it’s the only open-access argument I’m going to make in this presentation.So to recap a bit, we have our researchers, and they’re using computers, and they’re generating data.
- #8 And that support, librarians, has to happen throughout the entire data lifecycle. And that support, IT professionals, is absolutely not limited to providing computational horsepower and storage. And that support, scholars and researchers, has to include verification and documentation of data-gathering methods, so that everyone knows that everything’s on the level, and it’s got to include ways to refer back to other people’s data that you’ve used; that’s what I mean by ‘certification’ here.
- #10 So that’s the cyberinfrastructure puzzle as I see it. There are large swathes of it that I’m not going to talk about today...
- #13 Now here we are. This is data, right? Nice bar graphs and charts, with a nice key in the corner; you can imagine this on a web page or equally well on a print journal page.(CLICK) NO. No. Not data. This is not data in the sense I mean it.
- #15 For optimum reusability, we need to save data before it’s distilled into charts and graphs and tables. We need to save the cows before they become hamburger!
- #17 So in tight budget times, a very good question to ask is whether it’s actually necessary to solve this problem. Even if it is, do we have to solve it now? Do we have to keep all these data?(CLICK) The answer is a resounding -- sometimes. But I do want to add that even when it’s not absolutely required, it’s often a really good idea. On the Madison campus, we have collected a number of stories of researchers who wish they’d done a better job keeping their data, because a new use turned up for it, often years or decades later!So in what cases is it mandatory?
- #18 (mention NIH, distinguish articles from data)
- #19 Most of the funders requiring open data are in Europe at the moment, but that’s not true of journals. I can’t give you a laundry list, because it’s very discipline-dependent and also very volatile, but we are seeing more and more science journals instituting data-retention policies.Now, the ones I’ve seen have usually been time-limited; five or ten years is common. My question is this: if you’re going to do it for five or ten years, why not plan for longer? Sure, it makes sense to assess every now and again, because some datasets do become obsolete. But don’t let your thinking be governed by journal requirements; most of the work of keeping a dataset happens before the bits hit storage, so keeping them longer is often a very low-margin business.
- #21 There’s nothing stopping a journal or a funder from creating an unfunded mandate to keep and preserve data. A few have. And we, collectively, researchers and librarians and IT professionals, are left dangling on the hook figuring out how to comply.Okay. So that’s the stick. Now for the carrot. We’re keeping all these data. Why? What’s the use?
- #23 I’ve answered this already, for those who were listening at the beginning, but for anybody who came late, and just to reiterate, there’s an image of cyberinfrastructure that assumes it’s all about the Higgs bosons of this world. Physics, astronomy, and biomedicine. That’s who’s got all the data, just like they’ve got all the money.
- #25 A broader concern is so-called “small science,” which is science without the big bucks, which is frankly most scientists, not that that surprises anyone. The big guns have mostly worked out their data issues, as I’ve said. The small-science folks -- a lot of them hardly seem to know where to begin.(CLICK) And the sting in the tail here is that there are a lot MORE small-science researchers than big science. This means that if you pile up all their data, there’s probably a lot more of it! Each individual data-herd is pretty small by comparison with the Large Hadron Collider, granted. But add all those herds together, and we are talking a LOT of cows.
- #26 And my dearest loves, the arts and humanities, are hardly devoid of data. A digitized image is data. A digitized book is data, and can be computed upon. The performing arts are pushing out huge amounts of audio and video -- and while we’re talking storage capacity, digital video is an unbelievable headache because of file sizes.I like to think about folklorists and ethnographers while I consider digital data in the arts and humanities. Anything you can imagine is grist for their analysis mill, and yes, they are both analyzing digital data and recording their conclusions digitally.So we’ve all got data, one way or another.
- #28 And here’s the other thing... We don’t have a service-provision model for this. Not in libraries. Not in IT. Not in most regular research practice. Nobody’s sure how it’s going to get done yet.This is part of why I’m here today. UW Milwaukee is busily trying to sort out how to do all this, in addition to all the other cyberinfrastructure-related things I told you at the beginning I wasn’t going to talk about.
- #30 We know that apathy is not a solution. And here we often hear someone grumbling that if this was just all paper, it’d be fine; it’s this stupid digital stuff that’s the problem. Leaving aside that data on paper are completely useless as data, we shouldn’t ignore the incredibly complex safety net that libraries have built around paper. Paper doesn’t preserve itself either; librarians preserve it! Digital data are no different. We have to take intentional action to keep data viable.
- #31 Right, so who’s we?Okay. Show of hands. Librarians? IT pros? Faculty and researchers? Research support, grant administrators and the like?Right. If you raised your hand at any point, part of this is probably your problem. Which part, I don’t know, and anybody who tells you they know is lying and probably trying to sell you something.
- #32 So, can you tell a Holstein from an Angus? (I’m just going to die if there’s a dairy researcher in the room.)(CLICK) No, I can’t either. I can tell you that the Anguses are on the left, because I dug up the photos, but I swear that’s the only reason I know.The point of this little parable is that we know absolutely that data curation can’t happen without researchers helping and being cooperative with other people in the village. This is because data without context and interpretation are meaningless, like a spreadsheet with the header row chopped off -- and researchers are the people with the context and with the ability to interpret. Librarians and IT pros don’t automatically understand how a given dataset fits together, how it was created, how other people will expect to search for it or use it, what different parts of it even MEAN. Researchers will have to learn to express these things, if they don’t already know how!
- #33 IT pros, you’re going to be running the big iron. No surprises there. But there are surprises for you in this, such as time horizons you’re not used to, mass file format migrations, metadata internal and external and relational that we can hardly imagine yet... and so on. Don’t panic, we’re all in this together, and we have examples to work from, especially on the larger scales -- but by the same token, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just sail in and solve this one. It’s complicated.
- #34 Librarians, this is your call to arms. Step up and sit at the table, or the table is going to forget that we exist. This isn’t good for the table, and it’s not good for us, either.Sure, we’re used to dealing with the published literature, and we’re fond of its authority and finality. (CLICK) But we’re going to have to look earlier in the lifecycle for our greatest impact.
- #36 And then there’s the big gray area. When I said I didn’t know who would do all this? This is what I meant. Some researchers say that the solution is to teach themselves -- or up-and-coming newcomers -- information-management skills so that they become informaticists. Some researchers say that the answer is for researchers to learn to code.All of this will probably happen, in some fields and at some levels. I don’t know how it will all shake out, in the long run. But cross-functional training, no matter what end of the research enterprise you’re on, is probably the wave of the future.
- #39 Infrastructure is more than computers. It’s also a policy and procedures infrastructure, without which none of this can happen. And finally, as I dearly hope I’ve made clear, infrastructure is people. Fancy supercomputers aren’t worth a penny without people to use them, care for them, and take care of what they compute.
- #41 Everyone in this room can do this, and I hope you will. But, you may ask, what do you say?
- #43 mention Educause
- #46 I used so many Creative Commons-licensed photos that I have to actually roll the credits here... while that’s happening, let me ask if there are any questions?