Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences

"Cyberinfrastructure" is more than just hardware and software, more than bigger computer boxes and wider pipes and wires connecting them. The term was coined by NSF to describe the new research environments in which high-performance computing tools are available to researchers in a shared network environment. These tools and environments are being built, and the ACLS feels it is important for the humanities and social sciences to participate in their design and construction. Of course, scholarship already has an infrastructure: that infrastructure consists of the libraries, archives, and museums that preserve information; the bibliographies, finding aids, and concordances that make that information retrievable; the journals and university presses that distribute the information; and the editors, librarians, archivists, and curators who link the operation of this structure to the scholars who use it. This infrastructure was built over centuries, with the active participation of scholars.

Cyberinfrastructure is being built much more quickly, and so it is especially important that humanists and social scientists actively engage with it, articulate what they require of it, and contribute their expertise to its development. "Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences" presents an agenda for that engagement.