Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. BorgmanThe MIT Press, 2007

Last month I saw Christine Borgman speak at Columbia, courtesy of the Scholarly Communication Program. After the talk I decided to read her book, which covers much of the same territory, in greater detail. Borgman starts by saying that “The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data- and information-intensive collaborative research,” and goes on to talk about various historical/technical/cultural/policy-based aspects of that infrastructure (xvii). The book is nine chapters long, but each chapter is broken into much shorter sub-sections: I think this is supposed to make Borgman’s arguments clearer and easier to follow, but her writing is already pretty clear, and the combination of short sentences plus short sections made the book feel very choppy and dry to me. The way Borgman summarizes her earlier arguments, throughout, sometimes feels over-repetitive.

Still, there are interesting bits: I especially liked chapter 5, “The Discontinuity of Scholarly Publishing,” which talks about how the growth of digital publishing (formal and informal) is changing things. “Traditional models of scholarly publishing,” she writes, “coexist with a parallel universe of digital distribution outside the control of publishers. Publishers are here to stay, but so is that parallel universe” (82). Borgman also talks a lot about data—the fact that highly instrumented scientific research is producing more of it than ever, and the fact that data is most valuable if “related data and documents can be linked together in a scholarly information infrastructure,” though “no comparable infrastructure” to that for scholarly publishing (of documents) currently exists for data (115). Her final point is that we need to think about where we want to end up: information, she argues, is the most valuable part of scholarly information infrastructure, and the value of the information and the infrastructure can both be enhanced if we focus on making an infrastructure for information, rather than just an infrastructure of it.