- Central support for e-Research needs to be developed within many institutions, with institutional funding for at least a core team.
Skip to content Skip to navigation
Summary: Discusses the support that information services departments provide for e-Research activities
Information services departments often do not provide support specifically for e-Research. Large research-oriented universities tend to have research computing departments, computing centres or e-Science departments that fill this role but even in these such groups can be relatively small and lacking institutional support, being dependent on the acquisition of research grants. Where support for research is not strongly supported by institutions in their general IT strategy, problems can arise for information services staff working to help researchers utilise e-Infrastructures:
"unfortunately, this general strategy seems to change very, very quickly. That might be because the strategy isn’t well thought out or it doesn’t cover the things we actually would need to do or it’s missing foresight." (information systems staff)A member of another information services department raised the issue that departments like theirs are not necessarily equipped to provide hands-on support for research applications:
"within information services 20 or 30 years ago it was the case that people [...] had the skills [...]; information services I’d say has become more focused over the last few years on technical support, and I would say that application support has lost out."
More about this module: Metadata | Downloads | Version History
This work is licensed by Alex Voss under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Alex Voss on Jun 7, 2009 11:52 pm -0500.