In a short Educause Review article, Christine L Borgman describes several types of academic activity that are being profoundly influenced by information technologies:
- information-intensive scholarship
- data-intensive scholarship
- distributed scholarship
- collaborative scholarship
- multidisciplinary scholarship
Collectively, these are known as e-scholarship practices. They are types of academic behavior. They are not descriptions of the tools or technologies used in that behavior.
If academic librarians and IT staff are to provide appropriate collections and infrastructure, they need to understand e-scholarship and plan accordingly. Borgman suggests this is best achieved with library and IT strategies that “focus less on the technology per se and more on advances in scholarship and learning—that is, strategies supporting the ’scholarship’ in e-scholarship.”
This was an important element in formulating a set of principles to support the Scholarly Information Strategy recently adopted by the University of Melbourne. We knew that, because of the rate of change happening in technology and society, the strategy itself would need to be updated every few years. In designing the principles, we wanted to provide a decision-making framework that would last unchanged for a decade.
References:
Christine L Borgman (2008) “Supporting the ‘Scholarship’ in E-Scholarship” in Educause Review, volume 43 number 6, November-December 2008, pp32-33.
Christine L Borgman (2007) Scholarship in the Digital Age. MIT Press.
Tags: information strategy, educause, Information Futures Commission, scholarly information, decision-making, e-research
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