Grant to fund study of digital academia

Advances in technology continually change the way academia publishes articles, stores and… Advances in technology continually change the way academia publishes articles, stores and collects information and uses libraries.

What Ronald Larsen, dean of Pitt’s School of Information Sciences, wants to know is how that’s changed the way scholars communicate with each other and how it’s changed the role of libraries in helping scholars conduct research.

He plans to answer this question with SIS’s recent receipt of a five-year grant for $782,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

“Scholarly communication is moving from journals and traditional paper media forms into the digital realm,” Larsen said.

He explained that large amounts of data are now being stored digitally: on computers, on the Internet and on various electronic databases. This format allows for more information to be stored, in addition to simulations, animations and videos that are not available in paper journals.

Larsen calls this type of research “cyberscholarship.”

“Pitt and 18 to 20 other schools in North America work together to try to understand how scholarly communication is changing as a result of technology,” he said. This group campaign is called the iSchool Consortium and is considered the leader in this type of research.

Scholarly communication is the technical term for professors who research work in their fields and then publish the results. Other professors then read what they’ve done and might respond in their own articles or further research.

The advent of large databases has changed this type of communication, mainly by making it faster. Larsen gave the example of the National Virtual Observatory for astronomers.

“Historically astronomers would compete for time in observatories,” he said, “They would get their scheduled time, collect data and publish their research on a largely individual basis. Now as observations come back they are digitized. Databases are created, and they are publicly accessible to other scientists.”

The way it is now, an astronomer might not even have to go to the observatory. He could just reference the enormous database. Larsen called it the “re-use of collected data.”

Larsen pointed out that research has always been data-driven, but the change is that now there are much larger volumes of data to sort through.

“Data sets are so large that they go beyond the capability of a human-being to correlate patterns and analyze such immense volumes of data,” he said.

Librarians have long played an essential role in helping scholars perform research. With this revolution in the way scholars conduct research, and with so much more available data to research, librarians need to reconsider their roles, Larsen explained.

If librarians know how to navigate the databases, they can more effectively assist scholars in their research. Part of what the Mellon grant will focus on is the methods that establish a more useful partnership between librarians and scholars.

Another section of the grant will be used to send doctoral candidates in SIS out into different fields of study and take a closer look at how scholarly communication has changed in each.

This way, they can better understand their roles as librarians and how they can best disseminate information for scholars’ use in research.