Sponsored Jointly by the Research, Teaching and Learning Steering Committee and the Scholarly Communication Steering Committee

Background

The UK National e–Science Centre defines e–science as "the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualization back to the individual user scientists." E–science is defined broadly to include all of the natural and physical sciences, related applied and technological disciplines, as well as biomedicine and social sciences sharing research approaches with the natural sciences.

Charge

The Task Force is jointly organized by the Research Teaching and Learning Steering Committee and the Scholarly Communication Committee to recommend and initiate strategies to address emerging issues in the development of e-science for ARL libraries.

The work of the Task Force includes:

• Informing the membership about e-science issues.
• Identifying opportunities and recommending strategies for developing relationships with various government scientific agencies and other key stakeholders such as scientific societies.
• Building an understanding of the needs and experiences of scientists and researchers in various disciplines who are using electronic collections of scientific data.
• Recommending approaches to addressing issues related to the curation of long-lived digital data including the handling of simulations and storage of massive data sets.
• Engaging ARL members in the development of new roles for libraries as e-science infrastructure and service needs emerge at research institutions and promoting the contributions of research libraries in this arena.
• Identify the skills needed as information professionals move into the emerging e-science landscape and encouraging the development of information professionals prepared to assume new roles.

The Task Force monitors activities at the agencies and organizations that fund science research. In addition it is seeking points of intersection with key initiatives such as Science Commons.

The Task Force consults freely with either or both sponsoring steering committees as appropriate. Recommendations will be made to the ARL Board (copying the sponsoring steering committees).

At the end of its term the Task Force will prepare a final report for the sponsoring steering committees indicating its accomplishments and making final recommendations for future action by the steering committees or ARL.

Background documents

Several documents were recommended to the Task Force for background reading:

• National Science Board. Long-Lived Digital Data Collections Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsb0540/
• Canadian National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data at http://ncasrd-cnadrs.scitech.gc.ca/home_e.shtml
• Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future: A Vision and Research Agenda http://www.cra.org/reports/cyberinfrastructure.pdf

Timeframe

The Task Force is expected to complete its work by the end of calendar 2007.

Resources

A modest need for ARL staff support is anticipated.

Current Task Force Members