EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Resource Sharing

Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.

What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward?

"I believe that spreading and integrating the learning environment by building a setup that enables the mutual sharing of the world's educational resources is vitally important to higher education in Japan—and also to higher education in nations throughout the world."

Experiments are underway to provide library users with a browsable, electronic Table of Contents for books that are shared in a distributed collection environment.

The author discusses the Croquet Project, which is a combination of open source computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users. Such collaboration is carried out within the context of a large-scale distributed information system. The software and architecture define a framework for delivering a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network delivered resources.