Week 10 readings

Digital Libraries: challenges and Influential Work by William Mischo

This is an interesting article explaining the beginnings of research into digital libraries, i.e. having some sort of methodology programmed into how one searches  the web (putting the books back on the bookshelf if you will).

From government grants for a few schools with different needs, other institutions have adopted what was done in these studies, and google was born.  

Now, the need is to build something akin to Google scholar in digital library form.

Dewey Meets Turing: Libraries, computer Scientists, and the DLI

Hmmm.  So, computer scientists and librarians could have gotten along rather well together, systematically organizing a digital library, but the pesky web was born and grew up so fast and stressed the relationship.  Enter publishers and computer scientists can no longer make their discoveries open and free, but can only tease their colleagues with their new programs.

Meanwhile, librarians needs are not met and librarians think that computer scientists don't understand them and have forgotten about them, and computer scientists just wish librarians were more like computer scientists!

Institutional Repositories

I agree with the author that it does not make sense to have authors, especially of academic institutions to be in charge of posting their work online and archiving it.  This is not their job, and if forced to do it, will often be sub-par to what a centralized, specialized department could do with these works.

I also agree that they can be useful as collectors of ephemera.

But: they cannot claim ownership over a faculty or students work.

And cumbersome gate-keeping policies will be, in the words of the author, counterproductive. The author believes in keeping it simple.  Too much policy would undermine its effectiveness.

Also, as important as they are, let us not be too hasty in their implementation, but let us be thoughtful and end up with a useable, sane, repository.