Researchers become aware of the existence of e-Infrastructure services mainly through personal contacts and through the examples of others using them in their work. As a consequence, the following interventions can help to address the problem of awareness:
- Respondents have called for service providers to visit institutions, making use of staff development events. Roadshows such as the series of events funded by the UK's JISC, booths at research conferences as well as other dissemination activities can help to raise awareness. However, they are relatively expensive interventions that do not scale well.
- Embedding of information about e-Infrastructure services in instituional resources such as information services websites and catalogues.
- Embedding of education on distributed systems and e-Infrastructure services in research education allows awareness to be raised amongst coming generations of researchers.
"some of the OMII people have been helping us run the little short courses, so two three days courses on e Science or Life Sciences and these are actual workflows for Life Science and Medicine and that sort of stuff, and they’re incredibly useful just to some people like PhD students and post-docs." (researcher)
Clearly, such routine arrangements would be of immense value in other areas but they rely on having a critical mass both on the demand and the supply side. Another opportunity that has perhaps not been exploited to a large enough extent is to link e-Research with existing ICT training programmes and with doctoral training centres. - Case studies, roadmaps, examplars and success stories, e.g., in the form of briefing papers,
short articles or video clips can help to raise awareness not only of the existence of services but
also of the ways in which they can be combined and used.
I think what would be useful particularly would be [...] information about developments in the sector or information on let’s say case studies or exemplars where something has been identified as being a good practice possibly like the, the JISC intranet service where they have these sort of case studies and exemplars of how you go about introducing this to your institution. There’s something where people can actually have an easy access point something that’s quite readable but allows them to dig further.
Well I think the ideal would be to produce some kind of whether it’s a roadmap or a guideline. But some kind of simple short document or resource on the web that just explains the context of the resources that are available. I do think the idea of you know exemplars, worked examples would be very helpful. But they’d have to be seen as being relevant for people to have an interest in them.
Another important enabler is 'boundary spanning', where researchers move between their own discipline and another one, which may expose them to technologies and new ways of doing things:
“before I was at [my current institution], I was at an engineering department at [other institution] and so I was kind of aware of a lot of these things that we are talking about – Access Grid, e-Science.”The respondent recounted how they kept in touch with the e-Science programme from its early days even when switching institution and discipline area, for example through attending conferences. They used their experiences to come up with ways of applying e-Infrastructures in new contexts:
"[even] before the funding programme for e-Science had gone out I was aware of that, that it was happening and I thought 'oh, that is something we should look at for Arts and Humanities', so when the opportunity came for us to do something using e-Science technologies, I kind of hassled the research computing people [at my institution] to tell me about it."
