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Faculty Resource Guide

This libguide provides information on a wide range of issues of relevance to faculty including how to link to library resources, what you can and cannot put into Moodle, Open Content Sites, and Information about new Scholarly Communication Hubs.

New Knowledge Environments


Implementing New Knowledge Environments refers to Addressing key ideas - from policy to partnerships  - necessary to support scholarship in Canada.  Each is discussed below.

New Modes of Producing Knowledge


How scholars produce knowledge is transforming.  Instead of paper we now see Multimedia "publications", research data transformed into databases or visualized / mapped, (etc).  Similarly scholars have never had so many opportunities to collaborate with fellow academics due to web 2.0 technologies and collabative projects that allow researchers in a field to access remote findings (e.g. CERN Collider). These new means of producing knowledge are:

  • Triggered by Technology and Researchers
  • Based on heterogeneity and organization diversity
  • Require social sensitivity and accountability (e.g. in partnerships)
  • Require new approaches to quality assessment (e.g. rewarding researchers creating new forms of scholarly communication.)

 

Need to Create a Digital Research Environment (DRE)


Digital Rearch Environments are increasingly prevalent among all areas of research including the Humanities and Fine Arts.  In order to aid these endeavors in Canada, it is important that there is a Canadian Digital Research Environment that:

  • Provides a Digital Infrastructure (in the form of Data, Hardware, Software, Processing Power,  Expertise, Research Data Management and Policy Framework),
     
  • Supports the Living Ecosystem of relationships needed to make things work in digital scholarship.

Presently:

  • Data Stewardship has been provided by Portage (Compute Canada and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries). 
     
  • Many Dataverse instances are being provide to institutions - like Brandon University- via OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) 
     
  • National Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO) is in the process of consulting all stakeholders regarding needs and desired Infrastructure / Services 
     
  • The Leadership Council (consisting of Key Stakeholders) released a policy framework that discuss what is needed for a Canadian Digital Infrastructure.

 

Need to Broaden Support for Digital Scholarship beyond Specific Institutions


Institutionally and regionally (e.g. Scholars Portal), support for digital scholarship is emerging; however there is a need to make support available on a national level for scholars across institutions. 

Services and technological support are inevitably part of this national service.  Also important is:

  • Support for Research Data Management Practices and Infrastructure (aka Stewardship) that ensures that all information is both preserved and accessible for use and reuse; including finding aids that facilitate the easy location of data / publications.
     
  • Development of tools that facilitate digital scholarship such as Automated XML Tagging (to ensure content is easily located by search engines), sophisticated visual means of assessing data or texts, and open source software built on internationally agreed upon standards (in order to easily use and exchange information.)
     
  • Evolution of policies and inter-agency support for digital scholarly services available on a national scale (much like agreed upon participation and support for CRKN)

Need to be Aware of What is Already Happening in support of a National Research Infrastructure 


Several organizations are in various stages of creating some of the services and infrastructure needed for National Research Support Services:

  • Compute Canada is providing:
    • Advanced computing (wtih storage numbering in the petabytes) to researchers in all disciplines and for projects of all scales,
    • Access to over 150 staff members in 30 institutions accross Canada (60 of which have PhDs) who are tasked with providing research assistance to people accross disciplines.
    • Free service to public researchers (but charge service fees to industry partners.)
       
  • CKRN is seeking to advance research capacity in Canada by advancing an Integrated Digital Scholarship Ecosystem that builds on existing programs (e.g. Scholars Portal; Haithitrust) to build a system that provides:
    • Perpetual and seamless access to digital resources,
    • Trusted digital repositories for digitized collections; preproduction research and data; and purchased collections,
    • Data and text mining
    • Links to items in Open Access Repositories in one layer,
    • Support for a Scholarly Publishing Infrastructure
       
  • CANARIE provides "national ultra-high-speed backbone network that enables data-intensive, leading-edge research and big science across Canada and around the world"