Week 11 Readings

Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work

This article mentions what seems to me to be an overarching theme in my classes and discussions: For a digital library, the ability provide access to digital collections is vastly different than the ability to provide access to this information in a way that is useful and productive for users. Ideally, digital libraries seek to achieve a continuity across the various information resources. These various resources: databases of journals, books, etc. are all self-governing, so it is no easy task to provide the "seamless federation" of these resources that is sought after. The article discusses several projects in this field, and the tremendous progress that has been made towards this still-distant goal.

Dewey Meets Turing

This is a discussion about how the relationship between computer scientists and librarians has developed since the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative (1994). While we have extensively studied the impact and benefits of computerization and digitization of libraries, the article interestingly begins by mentioning some of the DL Initiative's benefits on the computer science field. Specifically, it bridged a sort of gap between the scientists' responsibility as researchers and the funders' pressure on them to impact society.

The combining of libraries and computer technology alone would surely have been a huge task, but nothing compared to what a problem it is when we throw the World Wide Web into the equation.

I greatly enjoyed the metaphors in this article :)

Institutional Repositories

Another run-in with our friend Clifford. This time he talks about the development of institutional repositories, which immediately became a very important means of scholarly communication. He views these repositories as a "strategy for supporting the use of networked information to advance scholarship."

Basically, institutional repositories provide a university (usually) with means to manage and disseminate digital materials produced by the university and its community, for use by the same. Today, these capabilities are a few years old, but their impact has already been significant. I'm not sure exactly where we are in the development today, but Lynch predicted 5 years ago that mature repositories "will contain the intellectual works of faculty and students - both research and teaching materials - and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution. It will also house experimental and observational data captured by members of the institution that support their scholarly activities."