Science is experiencing revolutionary changes thanks to digital technology, with computers generating a flood of valuable data for scientists to interpret. But that flood could drown science.
Data from experiments conducted as recently as six months ago might be suddenly deemed important, but researchers might never find those numbers — or if they did, might not know what the numbers meant. Lost in some research assistant’s computer, the data are often irretrievable or an indecipherable string of digits.
Dealing with the “data deluge,” as some researchers have called it, will be among the great challenges for science in the 21st century. Many in the field say that scientists should not be left to manage the data on their own. Instead, librarians will have to step forward to define, categorize, and archive the voluminous and detailed streams of data generated in experiments. Already, librarians on some campuses—among them Purdue, the Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California at San Diego—are beginning to take on that role. (The Chronicle)
Who should pay for archiving digital data? Should it be stored close by, where it can remain private, or in large, central repositories?
The Chronicle will have a live chat on the topic this Thursday, June 22, at 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern time. The guest will be D. Scott Brandt, associate dean of libraries at Purdue University, is helping to build a repository of scientific data that will be idistributed, or stored on the hard drives of faculty members, on departmental servers, or as part of a large-scale computing project run by Purdue and a handful of other institutions. Readers are welcome to post questions and comments now. A transcript will be available at this address following the discussion
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