I read the American Council of Learned Societies’ piece on Cyberinfrastructure, and while I found it interesting, I really wish they had included a clear, concise definition of what ‘cyberinfrastructure’ actually was. It is the ‘layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services shared broadly… but developed for specific scholarly purposes.’ It is ‘more specific than the network itself,’ but also ‘more general than a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or… a particular discipline.’ It lies between a ‘layer of base technologies’ and a layer of ‘software programs, services, disciplines, and communities of practice.’ From this, I gather that cyberinfrastructure is a layer, it both is and isn’t something developed for a specific project, and it encompasses a dazzling array of different factors. Labeling it something simple, like ‘the physical systems and organizational services required for digital scholarship to function’ would have been far easier to swallow.
The American Council of Learned Societies placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of cyberinfrastructure having inter-system operability, but the members don’t seem to propose much regarding how to implement this, nor how the myriad problems involved should be handled. Making multiple disparate systems uniformly compatible requires changing the individual systems, and deciding which one way is correct, along with persuading the others to spend the time and effort required for the shift, are likely to be problematic issues at best. This is especially problematic when ACLS also wants this cyberinfrastructure to be open to experimentation and evolution; in an open scholarly system, determining who will have the final say in what changes are implemented could be quite contentious, especially considering that any major change could result in significant changes in how the entire cyberinfrastructure operates.
