eScience: From My New Article

Large, collaboratively managed datasets have become essential to many scientific and engineering endeavors, and their management has increased the need for “eScience Professionals” who extend librarianship into solving large scale information management problems for researchers and engineers. Researchers in fields ranging from high energy physics, to climate change, to proteomics are struggling with the size and complexity of the datasets they and their colleagues generate and analyze. Yet these large, complex, often collaboratively managed datasets have become absolutely essential to successful discovery. Whether using the term "eScience," which was coined in Britain and is used extensively across the world, or "cyberinfrastructure," the term preferred in the U.S., the use of large scale datasets and the immense information technology infrastructure that supports them has become fully entwined with the contemporary practices of science and engineering.


Forthcoming in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science: http://jelis.org/about/vision-goals/