Review: Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine Borgman

Abstract

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine Borgman. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-02619-2. Innovations in information access via semantic Web and digital library technologies have set scholarly communication and research dissemination on a critical trajectory. But emerging technologies alone cannot define the infrastructure of digital scholarship, much less the specialized contents and disparate cultures of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, respectively; the historical and socio-economic foundations of academic publication and disciplinary boundaries have an abiding influence on the nature of, and access to, digital scholarship. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman presents a thorough appraisal of how the digital age affects the nature, momentum, and mechanisms of scholarly research dissemination. Borgman delineates the vocabularies prevalent in contemporary scholarly infrastructures and situates them in social, policy, technical or historical contexts. The author’s goal in this book was, “to frame research questions about practices, incentives, disincentives, and solutions for an e-Infrastructure and how those questions may vary by discipline and situation” (p. 264). Borgman (2007) describes the scholarly communication system in terms of the elaborate relationships between scholars, universities, and publishers; following Dutton (1999), Borgman considers scholarship’s competitive climate to be an “ecology of games” with dynamic interactions and unpredictable outcomes. Borgman demonstrates an idealistic bias as she writes how “[w]hen the interests of the many stakeholders are in balance, the system works well…” (p. 264). The intention of the author to initiate a conversation about digital scholarship, coupled with the book’s noteworthy readability, combine to invite a multiplicity of interpretations and charge readers to envision, and account for, the myriad of unattested connections between scholarship and technology in modernity. In order for a book to successfully solicit the kind of reflection and focused treatment that Borgman (2007) calls for, it must justify its mandate with respect to established authority. To substantiate the need for (re)building an information infrastructure for scholarly research, the author could begin by establishing an authority schema “from the ground up” (i.e. from data to published findings). Instead, the text’s logic departs from a pure scientific model as the author convincingly advances the most salient assumption for future dialogue on digital scholarship. Borgman (2007) posits that as the social and behavioral context of scholarly communication intersects vitally with public policy and technological innovation, the information practices of the various stakeholders (i.e. researchers, publishers, librarians, etc.) must be carefully analyzed: (1) to design equitable information infrastructures for the information society in general, and (2) to create sustainable infrastructures that not only cater to the needs of disparate academic disciplines, but that also facilitate collaborative research in particular. The book presents a well-referenced appraisal of scholarly information infrastructures, but could not completely incorporate equal treatment of the implications for the sciences, social sciences and humanities (as the author aimed to introduce). The book succeeds in offering overview of contemporary scholarly communications, including: print forms and genres; types and roles of data across disciplines; and