The term 'cyberinfrastructure' does seem to have achieved meme status in the last 10 months: a Google search gets more than 8800 hits. It seems to be a good cover term for a lot of the issues I've been fretting over with respect to digital library futures and the place of liberal arts institutions in their evolution.
A bit more hunting finds some other useful sources:
Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure:
Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure(pdf at http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/)
Some of the choicest bits from this Report:
...an even more profound and rapid transformation --indeed a further revolution-- in how we create, disseminate, and preserve scientific and engineering knowledge...See also: Cyberinfrastructure: opportunities for connections and collaboration (Joan K. Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Coalition for Networked Information)In numerous fields new distributed-knowledge environments are becoming essential, not optional, for moving to the next frontier of research...
A vast opportunity exists for creating new research environments based upon cyberinfrastructure... (4)
cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy.
...the cyberinfrastructure layer of enabling hardware, algorithms, software, communications, institutions, and personnel. This layer should provide an effective and efficient platform for the empowerment of specific communities of researchers to innovate and eventually revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates. (5)
...the opportunity is here to create cyberinfrastructure that enables more ubiquitous, comprehensive knowledge environments that become functionally complete for scientific research communities in terms of people, data, information, tools, and instruments and that include unprecedented capacity for computation, storage, and communication. Such environments enable teams to share and collaborate over time and over geographic, organizational, and disciplinary distance. They enable individuals working alone to have access to more and better information and facilities for discovery and learning. They can serve individuals, teams and organizations in ways that revolutionize what they can do, how they do it, and who participates. (12-13)
An information-driven digital society requires the collection, storage, organization, sharing, and synthesis of huge volumes of widely disparate information and the digitization of analog sensor data and information about physical objects. The digital library encompasses these functions, and research and development are needed for the infrastructure to mass-manipulate such information on global networks. Digital libraries also provide powerful tools for linking and relating different types of information, leading to new knowledge. These capabilities require new paradigms for information classification, representation (e.g., standards, protocols, formats, languages), manipulation, and visualization. (20)
A significant need exists in many disciplines for long-term, distributed, and stable data and metadata repositories that institutionalize community data holdings. These repositories should provide tutorials and documents on data format, quality control, interchange formatting, and translation, as well as tools for data preparation, fusion, data mining, knowledge discovery, and visualization. Increasingly powerful data mining techniques are creating greater demand for access to cross-disciplinary data archives. Through data mining new knowledge is being discovered in problem areas never intended at the time of the original data acquisition. (42)
The integration of real-time multisensor data with data mining across large distributed data archives opens further avenues for adaptive monitoring/observation, situational awareness, and emergency response.
...collaboration among disciplines is increasingly necessary and now requires, in some cases, hundreds of scientists working on a single project around the globe. Cyberinfrastructure should support this type of collaboration in a reliable, flexible, easy-to-use, and cost-effective manner. (44)
...because of converging advances in computation, digital content, and networking, the research community is poised to pursue its work in a much more connected and interactive way. We have the opportunity to extend networked systems to provide comprehensive and increasingly seamless finctional services for research and learning --to create virtual laboratories, research organizations, indeed technology-enabled research environments that offer a full spectrum of activities in the process of scientific discovery and the education of the next generation. We are at a threshold where a collaboratory or grid community can become "the place" where a research community interacts with colleagues, data, literature, and observational systems together with very powerful computational models and services. (44-45)