Week 10 Notes

“Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work,” by William H. Mischo

This article provided background information on the evolution of digital library technologies, a lot of which I knew nothing about.  I never knew that most of the research and projects were federally funded and were university-led.  There were six university-led projects, all focusing on different aspects of digital library research.  I found the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DLI-1 project the most interesting (and the project I would have most liked to work on), for they researched the “development of document, representation, processing, indexing, search and discovery, and delivery and rendering protocols for full-text journals.”  I also enjoyed that the article highlighted the actual achievements that were born from these projects.  For example, Google grew from the Stanford DLI-1 project and the Cornell University & UK ePrint collaboration DLI-2 project contributed to the foundation of the Open Archives Initiative for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).  It was nice to see that these government funded projects led to successful and global programs/corporations. 

“Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists and the Digital Libraries Initiative,” by Andreas Paepcke and et al.

This article discussed the collaboration between librarians and computer scientists dealing with the Digital Library Initiative (DLI).  It was appealing to learn about the affect the World Wide Web had on both disciplines and the DLI.  I learned that it was more difficult for librarians to integrate the Web then it was for computer scientists.  Computer scientists were thrilled to research and incorporate subdisciplines of computer science such as machine learning and statistical approaches into their work, while librarians felt the Web was threatening traditional pillars of librarianship, such as the reference interview.   The article also stated that the Web affected both communities by turning the retrieval of information into a more laissez-faire culture.  Another interesting point was the conflict between the two disciplines, for librarians felt computer scientists were “stealing” their money that should have been going into collection development and computer scientists were frustrated with librarians’ emphasis and wariness of metadata.  In the end, I felt the article was trying to suggest that the two needed to find a common ground on how to work together. 

“Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age,” by Clifford A. Lynch

In this information packed article, Lynch discusses the definition, the importance, the cautions, the benefits, and the future developments of institutional repositories, specifically university-based repositories.  He first makes a point to state that a university-based institutional repository is defined as a “set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.”  I support his opinion that a repository must contain both faculty and students’ research and teaching materials along with documents about the institution’s past and recent events and performances of intellectual life.  He goes on to discuss that faculty must take the lead in adopting this new form of scholarly communication and they must make the shift in using this information network full of new distribution capabilities.  I also agreed with his three cautions about institutional repositories.  He argued that the institution should not try to assert control or ownership over works through the repository, to not overload the infrastructure with irrelevant policies, and lastly to not make light of the seriousness and importance of the repository to the community and to the scholarly world. My favorite recommendation of Lynch’s was his opinion for the extension from institutional repositories to community and public repositories.  I believe this is a brilliant idea, and if accomplished, could lead to a wonderful collaboration between societal institutions, government, and members of the local community.