Community Tools: Care, Curation, and Scientific Collectives

Many scientists rely on distributed technologies and organizations that reach between laboratories and provide resources for groups of researchers with shared interests. These might be databases and repositories, newsletters and journals, or even libraries and seminars. They are often tightly cleaved to the communities they serve and produce, and may be thought of as ‘community tools’. Community tools also often require dedicated funding and depend on continual negotiation and curation, and in these ways have the potential to constitute and reconstitute communities of researchers. Professional experts, such as curators, animal technicians, librarians, stock keepers, manage and maintain these tools, but their stories have often been neglected in histories of the experimental sciences. This panel brings together four histories of such community tools, paying particular attention to the people who care for, curate and maintain them. We explore how such tools are established—who sets them up, what they gain and what they give up. We examine the labor, creativity and expertise of the people who maintain them, and how these have shaped researchers’ lives and practices. We reflect on the ways that community tools have created and stabilized scientific norms and habits. By bringing these stories together we pay attention to maintenance and care—who does it, how they do it, and why—and discuss what these can tell us about the creation and reconstitution of scientific communities.