Christine L. Borgman
Presidential Chair & Professor of Information Studies
Email: borgman at gseis.ucla.edu
Phone: (310) 825-6164
Fax: (310) 206-4460
Office: 235 GSE&IS Building
Box 951520, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520
Areas:
Scholarly communication, digital libraries, scientific information, information seeking, information retrieval, information policy, infrastructure, learning and cyberlearning, human-computer interaction, bibliometrics
Education:
Bachelor of Arts, Mathematics, Michigan State University
Master of Library Science, University of Pittsburgh
Ph.D., Communication, Stanford University
Research Interests:
My current research clusters in two areas. One is empirical research on the creation, use, and management of scientific data and its implications for science policy. This research is associated with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. As scholarship in all fields becomes more data-intensive and collaborative, the ability to share, compare, and reuse data becomes ever more essential. Data increasingly are seen as research products in themselves, and as valuable forms of scientific capital. Technologies such as embedded sensor networks are contributing to the "data deluge." Our research addresses data characteristics, data sharing, data policy, and data architecture. The goals are to apply knowledge of scientific data practices to the design of data collection and management tools, and to the design and policy of information services for research and education.
The empirical research on scientific data is one of many inputs to my second area of interest, which is analytical work on the changing nature of scholarship in an environment of ubiquitous computer networks and digital information. These threads are combined in my latest book, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, The MIT Press, 2007. I examine the origins of cyberinfrastructure and e-Science, the evolution of scholarly communication and scholarly publishing, and the role of digital data in new forms of research. Then I compare behavior and policy issues for publishing and for data, draw comparisons between disciplines in resources and practices, and lay out a research agenda for digital scholarship. The book draws upon literature from information studies, computer science, social studies of science and technology, sociology, communication, economics, law, science policy, education, history, and the constituent disciplines under study.