On July 16, 1999, Louise Forsyth (President, HSSFC) sent a letter out to the membership asking for answers to three questions:

What infrastructures, mechanisms or programmes are currently available and absolutely required to support your research?

What obstacles currently hinder or limit your research?

What infrastructures, mechanisms or programmes would most advance your research if there was funding available in the future?

95 replies have come in, from many disciplines and coast-to-coast. Researchers especially value the support of SSHRC, computer technology, release time, and their libraries. Common obstacles to research include lack of release time, computers, library resources, and grants, and institutional factors. Central to the kind of infrastructures, mechanisms, and programmes they speak of are all these.

In mid-September, HSSFC set up a Research Infrastructure Advisory Committee with nine members: Susan Hockey (Alberta), Ian Lancashire (chair; Toronto), Claude Paradis (Laval), Alan Richardson (UBC), Margery Stone (Dalhousie), Angela Vuk (Guelph), and three ex officio members, Louise Forsyth, Michael Owen, and Louise Robert. The committee has exchanged e-mail regularly since then. We look to this Roundtable for its advice and direction on the following questions.

I. What is research infrastructure?

Infrastructure includes those basic facilities that enable disciplines to do research. This commonly-accepted view distinguishes what everyone needs (infrastructure) from what individual or group research projects need (grants). Some researchers need release time. Others need travel grants, student assistants, personal copies of books, and computer workstations.

Infrastructure does not directly supply the needs of individual researchers but provides the essential facilities under which research by everyone becomes possible. For example, infrastructure for medical research includes CFI (the Canada Foundation for Innovation), which focuses on physical research structures, equipment, and staff to put them in place, but research grants come from MRC (Medical Research Council) and its likely replacement, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Is this a good working understanding of infrastructure?

II. What is the present research infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences?

Our infrastructural facilities embrace (1) our colleges and universities, (2) the research libraries of Canada, (3) SSHRC and provincial granting agencies, (4) government agencies (especially those providing information), and (5) HSSFC, its Aid to Scholarly Publication Programme, its annual Congress, and its member societies. In recent years, the Canadian government has added infrastructural facilities whose terms of reference include us: CFI (the Canada Foundation for Innovation), NCE (the Networks of Centres of Excellence), and CIHR (which is open to researchers in our disciplines who undertake health-related research). SSHRC and Statistics Canada together are funding the Canadian Initiative on Social Statistics. Many support needs identified in replies to Louise Forsyth's letter are already addressed by existing infrastructural facilities. For example, the most widely-perceived need is for release time. SSHRC and some colleges and universities have already acted to address this need by reinstituting the RTS.

Do any other major or promising infrastructural facilities for our disciplines exist?

III. Is there any area of research infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences for which no facility has been established?

Marc Renaud, President of SSHRC, in early October addressed the CFI/SSHRC/OECD/NSF/ERSC Conference on the Social Sciences for a Digital World. He suggested that the social sciences needed a broader definition of research infrastructure to fulfill their mandate in a digital world. That new mandate, he suggested, asks the social sciences to focus on new technologies to shape the questions their researchers ask and to supply the data used to answer them. Doing research in a digital world means, infrastructurally speaking, working openly and on-line with largely electronic resources. It means taking research public and making the Canadian people beneficiaries and partners.

Worldwide, the humanities and social sciences are facing a greatly expanded mass audience for their knowledge and expertise. How do we all do research in this new environment, especially when it is not yet in place for us? The pointed implication is that the humanities and social sciences do not yet have all the infrastructure, the basic facilities, to do research under new-millennium conditions. It lacks what might be called a digital framework for research.

IV. What kind of infrastructural facility could supply a digital capability for the Humanities and Social Sciences?

A digital capability for research in our fields means universal access to Canadian digital libraries. These would supply research materials, information databases, analytic software, electronic publishing mechanisms, nation-wide networks of faculty researchers and graduate students, centres or places to house nodes in this digital environment, and other electronic facilities. Canadian digital libraries could promote joint projects with researchers outside Canada. Only a minority of researchers in HSSFC societies have access to these resources. Existing infrastructure is failing them. Digital libraries, however, require humans as much as equipment.

Do you agree that digital infrastructure, understood in a broad sense, is not yet in place? Is there any other type of infrastructure you believe needs to be set up? Does digital infrastructure include human beings?

V. Can existing infrastructural facilities supply us with what we need?

In an ideal world, our traditional infrastructural facilities, especially our colleges and universities, our libraries, and our granting agencies, would set in place everything we need. They can, of course, all be partners in doing this, but they have not supplied the sciences and medicine with this infrastructure by themselves. They cannot give the social sciences and the humanities special treatment. Institutions have used government-sponsored investments in infrastructure to put science and medical research infrastructure in place. CFI defines research infrastructure in terms of equipment, software, and buildings. CFI also requires participation from non-academic partners.

Is CFI a good mechanism for supplying the humanities and social sciences with the infrastructural facility it is perceived they are lacking?
What are our natural partners in enhancing our infrastructural facilities?
Is it realistic to press government to treat the humanities and social sciences differently from the sciences and medicine?
If HSSFC could spearhead a cooperative initiative with its members and partners to raise massive government infrastructural funds, how would it do so?

Ian Lancashire Chair
Research Infrastructure Committee
November 14, 1999