Week 11 Readings

Reading 1) D-Lib Magazine July/August 2005
Digital Libraries

So, Digital Libraries. What can one say about them.
They are everywhere. "Federal programmatic support for digital library research was formulated in a series of community-based planning workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1993-1994." I had no idea they were even around until a few years ago.
Luckily, there were several grants given and many larger universities were working on varied digitization projects. "Some of the work led to significant technology transfer and spinoffs (e.g., Google grew out of research performed under the Stanford DLI-1 project). An international collaboration by Cornell and the UK ePrint project, under DLI-2, contributed to the development and adaptation of the Open Archives Initiative for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) specifications and protocols."

We've been talking about these browsers and technological breakthroughs lately. The last few years have seen huge advances being made in this field. Some of those are: Elsevier publications that Dr. He enjoys. They remember his favorite kind of articles and send them to him when published. How cool is that! Just like having your library send you your favorite authors books as soon as they are out, w/out having to fill out a reserve slip.
W3C (XML, XSLT), we've been looking at lately.
Also Web search engines such as Google Scholar, Google Print, and Yahoo).


Reading 2) D-Lib Magazine July/August 2005
Dewey Meets Turing Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI), began in 1994. This idea had librarians and computer scientists getting together to discuss digital libraries. With the onset of the internet, things got a little dicey. Publishers wanted to make money from the internet as well. They set deals with Universities to have their works made available to them, for a price, of course.

Luckily for librarians, where there is information wanted, needed, or stored, there must be people to obtain, share, disburse and maintain said information.
"The accomplishments of the Digital Libraries Initiative and many related activities external to its work have broadened opportunities for library science, rather than marginalizing the field." With cooperation many ideas and books can be shared, in person, or digitally.


Reading 3) ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 226 (February 2003)
Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
I'm looking forward to Jongdo's lecture next week to hear him explain this subject hopefully a little clearer. Mr Lynch tells us that "The development of institutional repositories emerged as a new strategy that allows universities to apply serious, systematic leverage to accelerate changes taking place in scholarship and scholarly communication, both moving beyond their historic relatively passive role of supporting established publishers in modernizing scholarly publishing through the licensing of digital content, and also scaling up beyond ad-hoc alliances, partnerships, and support arrangements with a few select faculty pioneers exploring more transformative new uses of the digital medium."

How many repositories are there? I'm not really clear if there are qualifications stated, or just suggestions for repositories. It sounds as if only higher education, or universities can be labeled a repository.
A repository may be used to preserve information; Manage the 'rights for digital materials'; and "facilitate access, reuse, and stewardship of content."



Muddiest Point: Dublin Core has again been mentioned. I thought that is was "a nice idea, or theory" but it didn't exist yet. Now I'm confused again.
(I know, it doesn't take much)


I commented on Evelyn's blog: http://emc2-technologychat.blogspot.com/
Anthony's blog: http://arklibraryscientist.blogspot.com/ and
Adrien's blog: http://www.azucchino.blogspot.com/