Week 10 Reading Notes

Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work

This article was very informative. It was nice to learn where the funding for such projects comes from and I thought it was interesting (and surprising) to learn how early DLI projects were thought of and initiated. I guess I just always assumed that they were started later in the 1990’s after the explosion of the internet and Microsoft and Internet Explorer, I thought it was really cool that organizations were interested in DLI much earlier. 

Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative

This article was interesting, the conflicts described between computer scientists and librarians, which, while not a new topic, made understanding some of the problems that exist in DLI easier to understand. It was also informative to note that both sides get aggravated with each other for what they see as either moving too fast or being too stuck in their ways.

I also found it helpful that the authors point out that while traditional librarianship may be reduced, the skills needed for it, (the organization of information, and its collation and presentation) are still very much a part of digital libraries, they just happen in a different way. 

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age

This article brought up many of the issues we have been reading about and discussing in our classes. The author notes the problems that occur when Institutional Repositories do not exist, or are not sufficient, at an institution. He also notes many of the issues, such as preservable formats and document rights, which we have discussed before in other classes. I think the article can be easily summarized into one sentence, that institutional repositories, “If properly developed, it advances a surprising number of goals, and addresses an impressive range of needs.”