This paper develops insights gained from a project that brought together an interdisciplinary team to conduct a one year joint study of information management within the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) community. We discuss memory and its relationships to data, information, and knowledge. Memory practices (Bowker, 2005) are at the center of LTER work – the community is aiming to build very long baselines of environmental data, baselines suited to the life of the ecosystem rather than (as is currently the case) to the lifetime of the researcher.
We analyze our ethnographic materials to draw out ways that knowledge is held in the LTER community. Such understanding informs information systems’ design and impacts development of a robust, persistent infrastructure supporting data work and scientific practices in environmental science. We present a conceptual framework for an information ecology inclusive of data sets and data collectors, information systems and knowledge makers, as well as digital federations and social networks. The framework is associated organizationally with local data centers, community learning centers, and global grids, respectively.
This work was carried out as part of the NSF Biodiversity and EcoInformatics project entitled ‘Designing an Infrastructure of Heterogeneity in Ecosystem Data, Collaborators and Organizations’. Our interdisciplinary team working collaboratively at the interface of environmental sciences, social sciences, and information sciences (Baker et al., 2002) was comprised of an LTER information manager, a science and technology studies expert from the field of communication, an ethnographically trained information systems designer, and the LTER community. Ethnographic fieldwork consisted of participant observations, transcribed JIIS Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 2005 BDEI Special Issue (in press) interviews, and focused visits to sites, meetings, and workshops. Paper and digital documents as well as photos were collected across all major roles and categories (site, network, and information management).
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Information Ecology: Open System Environment for Data, Memories, and Knowing
