Seminars will be held in the Lecture Theatre 1 - William Gates Building, Computer Laboratory at 4.15pm

	for the research groups' seminars:  Networks & OS seminars  Security seminars  Logic and Semantics seminars  weekly timetable

E-Science, Digital Libraries, and Knowledge Communities

Christine L. Borgman

University of California, Los Angeles, and Academic Visitor, 2004-2005, Oxford Internet Institute

E-science, as it is known in the U.K. and Europe, or cyberinfrastructure, as it is known in the U.S., promises to facilitate scientific and scholarly collaborations around the world by providing access to common data repositories, tools, and services. Considerable progress is being made on building the technical framework, on establishing standards for interoperability, and on the construction of digital libraries to store scholarly content. However, relatively little research has been done to determine how and whether these technologies will facilitate collaboration or enable access to new forms of knowledge. Evidence from prior social studies of science suggests that the adoption of such information technologies is a complex and not always successful process. This talk will summarize research in progress to address intertwined problems presented by e-science: (1) identifying the opportunities and barriers for facilitating scholarly collaboration, and (2) making scholarly content useful for research and for teaching purposes. Digital libraries are viewed as the technology that bridges communities and applications. These problems will be illustrated with case studies from two large digital library projects: the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) in the field of geography, and the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) in the fields of ecology and seismology.