Let’s hear it for the infrastructure of scholarship! We tend to focus on scholarly products — books, articles, lectures, databases, and the like — without acknowledging that our scholarly productivity is highly dependent upon a complex series of institutions and services.
I work in the humanities and social sciences, but let me speak for the moment from the vantage point of a humanist.
The central institution for those of us in the humanities is surely the library. We are the people of the book (and the article), and humanists are probably more dependent upon library resources and services than anyone else on a university campus. We need the texts we study, whether they are in our own libraries or elsewhere in the country (and the world). We need the assistance of expert librarians, ranging from book selectors to government documents librarians. We need the growing library capacity to connect us to digital information licensed by our own institutions or accessible elsewhere, and (frequently) we need the assistance of library or Office of Information Technology technical staff.
We are also dependent upon the extraordinary system of independent research libraries, museums and historical societies that sustain our research, here and abroad.
We depend upon publishers, ordinarily nonprofit (and frequently university) presses to select, edit, and present our work to larger publics. We also depend upon scholarly journals (publishers of a different sort). In the humanities these are almost entirely nonprofit organizations, ordinarily supported by learned societies. And of course we depend upon the learned societies themselves to convene annual meetings, to develop professional standards, to support the national organization of the various disciplines and fields. We are dependent upon the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council to provide a variety of leadership activities in our fields.
We depend upon funding agencies, ranging from philanthropic foundations (Mellon, Guggenheim, ACLS) to public agencies (NEH, NHPRC, the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright) to support our research. And over the past few decades we have become quite dependent upon research centers, both campus-based (humanities institutes and centers) and independent (the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Center for the Study of the Behavioral Sciences, the New York Public Library).
I realize this is a cursory and partial list of our dependencies, but I want to make the point that the ecology of humanities research is rich, complex, and interrelated. Aside from the institutions I have listed, we also organize ourselves into conferences, research projects, scholarly networks, and the like. But it seems to me that most scholars are woefully unaware of their dependencies, and thus fail to recognize and support the institutions that sustain them. This is true on university campuses, where in my experience the library and librarians seldom receive the understanding and political support they deserve, and require. But it is even truer of independent infrastructural institutions (the digital humanities infrastructure, for instance), which tend to be there when we need them. We take infrastructure for granted at our scholarly peril. We should pay more heed to it.
