So I was poking around looking for a podcast the other day when I stumbled upon a link to an Interview of Lynch at Educause Connect. The interview was from the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) 2006 Fall Task Force meeting. After listening to the interview, I began to think about the various meanings of the term “cyberinfrastructure” and how there is really no consensus of the meaning. While contemplating that, I was reminded of the various physical components that people might consider when using the term.

Certainly, software, hardware, people, data, networks, etc. are all valid components when we think about cyberinfrastructure, but it occurred to me after listening to the interview that the real value of these components lies, not just in the physical manifestations of these as resources, but in how they interconnect (and are interconnected) with each other. But perhaps even more importantly is how we are finding novel ways to harness such a cyberinfrastructure in interdisciplinary ways. How do you define cyberinfrastructure?

In the interview, Lynch espouses the emergence of new collaboratives in the evolution of data, from curation to application and he talks about the changing roles of libraries and librarians in such collaboratives. He also discusses the challenges of new collaboratives and what these mean to educational institutions and scholarship in general. More specifically, he discusses the creation of new organizational structures that address the varied expertise needed to efficiently create, access, manipulate, and store multiple types of data.

Go here to hear the Lynch interview.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lynch, you can get more info about him here.

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