In another interesting CNI podcast interview Charles Henry, Vice Provost & University Librarian at Rice University, talks about the humanities cyberinfrastructure and that it’s not all about the technology:

people with the requisite skills to work with faculty, to work with researchers, to create the kind of digital architecture where massive amounts of information, multimedia information, can be brought together and queried most effectively for the discovery of new knowledge, so it-s a pretty complex set of issues that converge on this term.

Henry points out the need for national coordination in cyberinfrastructure developments, particularly across disciplinary boundaries – even across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. “Needs of scientists, humanists overlap quite a bit…rather than have disaggregated activity going on, a more central approach on campus and nationally to these shared interests.”

While agreeing that there is a strong legacy of publishing printed books in the humanities, he states that “many disciplines will soon become completely dependent upon digital resources. These resources are creating different strategies, different questions posed.”

He points out that there’s the opportunity for libraries to continue working more collaboratively in order to develop national (I would say, international) digital libraries that can be federated.

Finally, Henry points out that a weakness of libraries is their isolation from scholarly societies and the isolation of librarians on campus as a separate group. Henry calls for more programmatic integration into scholarly societies. That’s an interesting approach. Librarians should certainly be attending the scholarly conferences in their disciplines rather than just attending library-related conferences.

Also, unfortunately, it seems that at some campuses the academic librarians are still so focused on integration simply through giving librarians faculty status and tenure, which definitely is not the solution.