Week 11 Readings

Mischo, W. (July/August 2005). Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/mischo/07mischo.html
One point I really liked: there is a huge difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections and providing digital library services. This article addresses such issues.

The six University-led projects are great:
*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.

Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005). Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/paepcke/07paepcke.html
Since the Digital Libraries Initiative was launched, many issues have arisen. This article discusses concerns from viewpoints of librarians, computer scientists, and publishers. It was interesting to read discussions of how these three groups are affected, how they are connected, and how the initiative can fulfill their expectations.

One interesting term I had never heard of before, in this context anyway: The notion of collections is spontaneously re-emerging in the form of what computer scientists have named information 'hubs.' These new incarnations of collections are Web sites whose primary goal is to direct visitors to other Web sites that all specialize on the hub's topic focus. (The hubs' topic-specific target sites are called 'authorities' in the literature). Quality hubs require curation. This type of curation differs from its traditional cousin in that it must cope with sometimes ephemeral material, and in that it requires a different underlying skill set. The spirit of this function, however, remains.

Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html or, rather:
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/
We've had many changes in recent years: online storage costs dropped (so repositories are affordable), new standards are in place (such as the open archives metadata harvesting protocols), the need for digital preservation is now recognized and clear, and an increase in free and publicly accessible journal articles in research areas (among others). These have all helped lead to having university-based institutional repositories, which in turn offers the community (and institution) access to their digital materials. These could house the intellectual works of students and scholars within their institution. This is a great thing to accomplish--not only would these works be preserved, but access to them would be greatly increased.