The Reality of Collaboratories

Advances in data acquisition and dissemination technologies along with several other computer science technologies provide an opportunity to define new environments for remote access to scientific instruments and collaboration between researchers at remote sites. These environments, called "collaboratories"[1], provide complete location-independent collaborative access to instruments, data acquisition and analysis resources, as well as to collaborating researchers. Over the past two years we have built a prototype collaboratory at the SpectroMicroscopy Facility of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Beamline 7.0 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The scientists who use the beamline are based at different cities around the world. Before the introduction of the collaboratory, an experiment at the beamline required that multiple researchers travel to Berkeley, CA. With the collaboratory, scientists can now discuss experiments with other scientists around the world and at the beamline, ..