Week 11

Mischo, W. (July/August 2005).  Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8)

There is a difference between providing digital library services and providing access to digital collections

Gateway and navigation services have been added to address these concerns

“The mantra has been: aggregate, virtually collocate, and federate”

The Digital Libraries Initiative (now called DLI-1), was established in 1994 and federally funded digital library research

Several other organizations contributed funds for research in the following years, totaling $68 in federal funds

Six universities led projects that developed computing and networking technologies. The following universities were included:

“The University of Michigan for research on agent technology and mechanisms for improving secondary education;

Stanford University for the investigation of interoperability among heterogeneous digital libraries and the exploration of distributed object technology;

The University of California-Berkeley for imaging technologies, government environmental information resources, and database technologies;

The University of California-Santa Barbara for the Alexandria Project to develop GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and earth modeling distributed libraries;

Carnegie Mellon University for the study of integrated speech, image, video, and language understanding software under its Informedia system; and

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the development of document representation, processing, indexing, search and discovery, and delivery and rendering protocols for full-text physics, computer science, and engineering journals.”

The Illinois project enabled the transmission of technology to publishing partners, which created the contribution of web-based access to full-text and journals.

Most of the publishers that support this feature are very close in structure to that of the Illinois project

Many significant digital library standards and technologies have developed entities outside of the federally funded projects.

Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005).  Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).

DLI- Digital Libraries Initiative

Librarians were excited about DLI because they knew information technology was important to their impact on the scholarly world

Librarians recognized the value in capabilities, holdings management, and instant access and Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACS) which enabled digital searching

The advent of the internet greatly challenged computer scientist and librarians

Computer scientists and librarians teamed up to create a resource to search, organize, and browse

At times computer scientists believed that librarians would be less relevant but librarians reminded them how much key information is involved with searching that librarians would need to assist in

The line between consumers and producers of information was blurred by the internet

There were impediments in the process in regards to sharing information mostly because of copyright issues

Computer scientists were drawn to this because of the natural connections with information sharing, machine learning, statistical, and other heuristic approaches

After relevance was expanded to include different subject areas, more researchers got involved

The web’s easy retrieval of so much information made people much more relaxed about the accuracy of search results

There are some hard feelings between librarians and computer scientists because some felt the DLI money would be available for the collection but it was not

Some also felt DLI created an environment that made librarians look less relevant

Hubs have re-introduced the notion of collections

Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226

Institutional repositories should include the works of both faculty and students, documentation of events of the institution, and research and teaching materials, experimental and observational data

Institutional repositories are supposed to be a recognition of intellectual life and scholarship that can be shared digitally

Faculty are at a disadvantage (and so are institutions) because they have had to play the role of systems administrators which takes time away from their research/teaching, some do not have the skills to do so and dealing with converting the information to current systems often leaves the information unable to be accessed at some point

It becomes the task of faculty to argue the legitimacy of investing in works of digital scholarship

Preservation is a main requirement to enable this

Scientific journals are accepting articles from other disciplines as “supplementary” materials

Disciplinary repositories will never fully be comprehensive (except for a very few-such as the sciences)

If faculty are properly empowered, institutional repositories can be greatly enhanced with scholarly content

Institutional repositories exert control over what has typically been faculty controlled work

Institutions have been overloaded with irrelevant policy baggage

The quality of these repositories may decrease because institutions may rush to implement them without enforcing quality

Policy, management failure, incompetence, and technical problems could cause them to fail over time

Preservable formats, identifiers and rights and documentation management are vital for institutional repositories

Muddiest Point-

I understood the concept of XML- it just seems as if it requires practice