Averting a Digital Katrina: Sustaining Trust in the Research Infrastructure (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE

Averting a Digital Katrina: Sustaining Trust in the Research Infrastructure (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE

Amy Friedlander, Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources, wrote a very helpful and insightful article on the issuing of sustaining trust in the research infrastructure. The article was published in the Educause Review website.

Friedlander starts off the article by explaining her Katrina anaology. When the Hurricane Katrina stormed over New Orleans and the levees broke, the victims placed a huge trust on the infrastructures to step in and help them out. However, the infrastructure themselves had broken down: social, engineering, and political, thus creating this huge Catch-22 with huge repercussions that are still felt today.

She states that trust in an infrastructure stems from familiarity of a system; when things are running along as expected we build trust on its reliability, which explains in part why traditional scholarly publication remains robust even with the development of other methods of communication are evolving. Friedlander quotes Christine Borgman in identifying the three major functions that traditional scholarly communication achieves:
1) legitimizes scholarly work
2) disseminates that work to an audience (or several)
3) provides access, preservation and citation

The writer and reader share the same expectations and the repeated "success" of such a system causes scholars to cling to the older methods of scholarly communication. Plus, the long tradition of building prestige from having your work published in a famous or prestigious journal is still in effect.

However, the electronic publishing format is going happen regardless and Friedlander points out some of inconsistencies and examples that display a lack of trust in such systems and then proceeds to explain why this is rightly so. Scientists rarely participate in social-networking or create blogs or wikis of their research, namely data, partly because there is a huge confusion of how to correctly cite e-works in a paper. Print is seen as more authentic and is easier to cite, to boot.

Friedlander spends some time discussing the issue of citation: print articles and journals are a form of efficiency in citation and also uphold the core values of research:

1) attribution and credit
2) reliability
3) persistance
4) validation of sources
5) integrity of audience
4) replication of results

She states that very interactivity and the dynamism of the digital medium undermine the core values of trust in scholarly research. For example, the ability to download data in order to verify the experiment means inconsistency in how the data is displayed, which introduces unexpected results in the infrastructure which is hardly conducive for one to relax in the cyberinfrastructure.

Friedlander ends the article by saying that "retreating to analog is hardly the answer," nor is giving up the standard methods of interpretation, however in building up trust in the cyberinfrastructure requires long-term management and preservation of the digital data along with the policies and methods that encourage discovery, community, and discussion is the key.

Friedlander's article echoed many of the sentiments that were discussed in the class readings in struggling to define where trust comes from and how the traditional methods of scholarly publication are still widely preferred because of familiarity and a well-established expectation of be able to gain scholarly prestige. She did not really come up with any solutions to the issue at hand, similar to the other articles. This issue is a philosophical one and will remain under discussion for quite some time because I feel that scholarly communication is under a huge transistion and will happen in spite of itself with issues more or less resolving itself in response to problems that may or may not occur.