Reading Notes, Week 11

Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work

I think the Federated Search Diagram made the article easier to understand right from the beginning. Usually, my eyes glaze over the text trying to fully understand this material, so it was nice to have a visual to help guide me along.

I found Lynch's statement, "there is a huge difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections and providing digital library services," to be insightful, as well as accurate. Anyone can provide access to a collection (limited, at that), but it doesn't count as library access unless full library services are provided, or at least something resembling that.

Following that issue, the article was able to address funding issues and how to expand digital library services. This was helpful because it allowed me to understand just how we can and must go in providing full service.



Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digitial Libraries Initiative

After reading this introduction, I first thought about how our IS program covers those divided between librarianship/archivists and computer scientists. Without the DLI and programs similar to it, what would our educations be like now? Is it likely that both fields would be under the same tent of information science, or would it have an inevitable marriage anyway as a result of computer systems to automatically expand information access? According the article, yes. "The scientists had been trained to use libraries since their years of secondary education. They could see, or at least imagine how current library functions would be moved forward by an injection of computing insight." However, I think it's just as true that those of us on the library side were able to recognize the value of computer science (And the article acknowleges this). Still, I'm not sure if it's an important to wonder who met who, or if both sides met halfway.

I felt that the last section of this article, "Mutual (Mis?)Conceptions" really highlighted what is possible in the future of this ever-evolving union, and this quote really sums up frustration (at least among aspiring librarians): "[I]n any union both sides need something that recalls their old identity."



Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age

First off, it never ceases to amaze me just how much funding, or lack thereof, drives innovation. Technology is already advancing at fast rate, but it's simply an understatement to say that innovative ideas are a result of those cut off from either access to information or funding, which is frustrating, but encourages creativity all the same.

Anyway, while I think I understand the concept of an instituational repository, I'm not sure I can visualize an actual repository of colloaborative student/faculty work that Lynch discusses (aside from the MIT example - dspace.org), mainly because he tends to write in abstractions and generic terms. Obviously the web and the advancement of computer science in general has given people, specifically faculty, the ability to disseminate information, but I don't really have an idea of what the ideal digital repository (although there is large list of them here) is or how to create it, let alone how to engage in, as Lynch puts it, stewardship. The closest I can get to visualizing this idea, is to think about library vendors such as JSTOR. So, I guess what I can take away from this idea is the creation of an open source project, similar to a wiki, only privy, for example, to the students and faculty at Pitt - with more rules, mostly relating to control of content.

If institutional repositories become an accepted and common reality, should it be a requirement that every students' and faculty members' academic work be submitted to the repository?

Note: This was orginally sorted under "Reading Notes, Week 10" until I realized that everyone but me had the above readings under Week 11, and the syllabus's Week 11 readings under Week 10 on the blogs