ABSTRACT
The Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC) is a project to provide upper atmospheric physicists with networked computer technology to support the practice of their science. UARC is an instance of a collaboratory, the “& combination of technology, tools and infrastructure that allow scientists to work with remote facilities and each other as if they were co-Iocated &”(Wulf, 1989, p. 6). A National Research Council (1993) report defines a collaboratory as 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” (p. 7). Put simply, a collaboratory is the use of computing and communication technology to carry out geographically distributed scientific activity. For more background on collaboratories, see Finholt and Olson (1997).
