Kate McCready
Ethic Share Project Director
University of Minnesota
John T. Butler
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
University of Minnesota
Virtual research environments have the ability to facilitate new forms of collaboration, community engagement, and exchange for scholars. This presentation will include discussion of the endeavor to develop a virtual research community site for the field of bioethics, and other areas of applied ethics, called EthicShare. EthicShare, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation, grew out of a 2004 Scholarly Communication Institute hosted at the Council on Library and Information Resources and sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.
EthicShare will make available quality electronic content (records for articles, books, news stories, etc.) and provide an innovative space for community exchange and engagement. Online social tools present opportunities to enable collaboration and, potentially, to advance new forms of, and new infrastructure for, scholarship. As this environment takes shape, there is potential to create functionally-complete online spaces in which scholars can explore, interact and conduct their work. Virtual research communities offer significant promise to meet scholars’ appetite for collaboration and to share resources on a global scale. The question of whether the capability for social tools and spaces are relevant in enabling collaborative research will be explored. While the technologies exist to create virtual communities, the gap between potential and reality is large. The challenge to sustaining the content and the community over time will also be examined. This challenge is, broadly, the economic question of which organizational and institutional models should be invested in to enable sustaining such communities. Additionally, the presentation will consider what role libraries should play in the development of virtual organizations, and what models should be used to facilitate their development.
