Building Disciplinary Collaborations on the World Wide Web: Strategies and Barriers

Geographers have begun to experiment with using the World Wide Web to cultivate national and international collaborations in instruction and research by creating digital libraries, clearinghouses, academic programs, and instructional materials. Comparisons are drawn among eight major projects now underway to examine what strategies are most successful in promoting intradisciplinary collaboration. All face barriers related to faculty incentives and rewards and to a variety of financial and institutional factors. Strategies that seem best able to overcome these barriers adapt existing models of scholarly collaboration to the Web, as in the creation of digital handbooks and texts, are tightly focused around very specific topics and programs, and strive to build alliances within local or regional university systems or among neighboring and sister institutions.