Good morning. Welcome to the forum E-research and cyberinfrastructure, co-sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and the Coalition for Networked Information. I'm Sarah Thomas, University Librarian at Cornell, and immediate past president of ARL, here with Cliff Lynch to set the stage. To introduce the topic, I'd like to describe a recent experience I had. At the beginning of September, I was invited to join a group of senior administrators from Cornell in an Executive Leadership Workshop organized by the National Academies and held at MIT. Our entourage included the president, provost, VP for Information, VP for Research (a Nobel laureate) the dean of the faculty of computing and information science, and myself. Participating with us were other senior administrators (presidents, provosts, CIO's, deans) from Carnegie Mellon and MIT, plus Jim Duderstadt, the former president of Michigan, and John Seely Brown, the former director of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) . We spent a facilitated 22 hours comparing notes and sharing fears and challenges relating to the impact of technology on higher education.
Our conversations ran the gamut from IM and the behavior of the "Net Generation" to computer security, data stewardship (digital preservation), and the cost of infrastructure. We spoke of how to benefit from economies of scale, and considered if there were areas in which collaboration would be fruitful, even in the open acknowledgment that our institutions competed for students, faculty, research dollars, and reputation. We noted that it was difficult to fund the humanities, since much of the infrastructure in the sciences and engineering had been subsidized by research funding. At the same time, the institutional representatives confided that the students at these technologically advanced universities had such a high expectation of bandwidth and capacity that they were challenged to stay on the cutting edge and to deliver 24/7 high quality service. This expectation was at odds with the financial wherewithal. Moving to a campus standard was one way of guaranteeing consistency and managing costs, but this conflicted with departments' desires to be autonomous and push innovation. We talked about the rising phenomenon of open source software, and new active learning technologies. Library concerns, such as the cost of access to scholarly journals (and the anticipated insustainability of the current model) and how to make our students sophisticated citizens about the acquisition and use of information also surfaced. The importance of visual thinking and the question of how to read and annotate complex, multimedia scholarship emerged as other challenges.
At the end of the day we flew home, stimulated, but without certain direction. What had I discovered? After being in the company of some of the world's leading thinkers, I realized anew how complex the issue of e-scholarship and e-research is. We exist in a time of revolutionary developments in technology, and as a consequence, the world of higher education is transforming. Allied organizations and institutions with common purpose can collaborate to manage the cost and to share the work of supporting these research environments, but such efforts are not entirely natural. Indeed, one of the salient characteristics of these advanced institutions was a high degree of internal autonomy. We observed that Cornell, it was the first time that leadership of the institution had gathered to discuss these issues, and that this coming together was perhaps the single most valuable aspect of the workshop. It is clear that higher education faces significant challenge in transforming itself from a text-based, linear, hierarchical enterprise into one that is multidimensional, boundary spanning, collaborative. For my Cornell group, we all agreed that it was the first conversation of many that we would share about a topic that would shape the future of the university.
Today, we will partake of conversations of similar importance for us as information professionals. I hope that you, too, come away exhilarated by the possibilities, and ready to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.