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Help Desk

What is a Collaboratory?

A Collaboratory is a...

"...'center without walls' in which the nation's researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location -

interacting with colleagues,
accessing instrumentation,
sharing data and computational resources,
and accessing information in digital libraries."

Bill Wulf (1989)

In a Collaboratory, the presentation/meeting concept embodied in videoconferencing is extended to allow informal, in-depth, collaboration on work-in-progress. Access to instruments, data, and laboratory notebooks, as well as computer display sharing (with annotations and remote control) allows members of a Collaboratory to interact as closely as if they were "just down the hall".

Scientific Collaboratories are designed to enable close ties between scientists in a given research area, to promote collaborations involving scientists in diverse areas, to accelerate the development and dissemination of basic knowledge, and to minimize the time-lag between discovery and application.

The Collaboratory concept of an enabling collaborative environment can be applied to diverse areas including:

• experimental and computational research in the biological and physical sciences
• education
• clinical medicine and medical information systems
• computer and information sciences
• distributed rapid response teams
• collaborations in the humanities.

The EMSL Collaboratory

Development of the EMSL Collaboratory is a symmetric collaboration between computer scientists, domain scientists (physical and biological sciences), and sociologists. The Collaboratory relies on the development of new communications technologies - shared computer displays, electronic notebooks, virtual reality collaboration spaces - and an integration of these technologies with current videoconferencing and email capabilities.

Another necessity is the integration of these communications technologies with scientific resources - instruments, data, analysis software, and the scientific literature. Researchers using these tools will need to change their current processes to take advantage of these tools to enhance existing collaborations. They must also discover new ways of sharing tasks between distributed collaborators that will make the best use of individuals' expertise and time.

Sociologists can guide development and use based on experience with traditional collaborations. The fact that many of the social cues used in face-to-face interactions are not present in computer mediated communications suggests that developers might need to provide alternatives. (It also suggests ways that Collaboratory interactions might be superior to face-to-face interactions, e.g. allowing a good idea to be considered independent of its source.)

The synergy of these groups working together is depicted in the Borromean Rings logo of the Collaboratory.

The Benefits

The Collaboratory concept has the potential to greatly benefit the DOE, and the scientific community in general, by expanding the resources available to individual researchers, increasing the efficiency of our research system, and by coupling basic and applied research efforts more tightly to national goals. It has the potential to remove the walls around departments and organizations, and could lead to the creation of a meta-laboratory with capabilities - in both expertise and equipment - that far exceed those available in any one laboratory.