Digital Libraries
This article discusses digital libraries and a survey of the work done in this area. It appears that funded projects first began around 1993/1994 by the National Science Foundation and the Digital Libraries Initiative which funded 6 universities for research, including CMU. There have also been other non-governmentally funded projects, including publishers, LoC, NISO, W3C, ISO, Google Scholar, and the open source community that have contributed to digital libraries. In the 21st century, we have many different organizations and people working to contribute to resource access through the internet/web in ways that I do not think could have been anticipated in 1993.
Dewey Meets Turing
This article discusses the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), which began in 1994 by the NSF, but it involved publishers, librarians, and computer scientists, people who I am sure that previously considered themselves in the same field. This project gave computer scientists a way to use computers to enhance library systems and research. It gave librarians (finally!) some funding, but it also gave them more efficient ways of searching and managing large collections. What this article calls the "cuckoo's egg surprise" is the introduction of the WWW and how this affected digital libraries. I thought this line summed up the issue well: "The Web not only blurred the distinction between consumers and producers of information, but it dispersed most items that in the aggregate should have been collections across the world and under diverse ownership. This change undermined the common ground that had brought the two disciplines together." While computer scientists did not feel shaken, those in the library field, used to their systems already in use, were faced with learning such a new technology and somehow integrate into those existing systems. Plus, with publishers starting to charge extra for digital availability of content, small budgets have forced libraries to cancel them. In the end, however, the author asserts that the DLI only helped to create new opportunities for librarians and library models.
Institutional Repositories
This article begins in 2002, when institutional repositories began to be used for scholarly communication, and standards were set for metadata and other aspects of digital information. The DSpace institutional repository was ed by MIT, and in 2003 it was duplicated for many other universities, and now can be found in open source form. According to the author, a "university-based institutional repository is 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" (2). It not only makes information available, but preserves it in digital form. However, it is noted that there are questions regarding how an institutional repository fits in with other organizations that do similar things. Another thing that is questioned is the legitimacy of digital publication, especially of something that never existed in print form. Many university faculty members do not have the time or energy to defend this choice, but by not publishing digitally, they cannot insure that their work will be available as formats and technologies change. An institutional means of managing all this information could make it easier to keep such publications current and available.
MIT also makes information available through OpenCourseWare, a free application that allows anyone anywhere with an internet connection to watch MIT courses. These were very helpful for my boyfriend, who was taking Quantum Mechanics in Italian at the Università di Bologna and needed a little extra, especially English, instruction. However, the author notes that this software could also be used to share and save campus events, and other extra curricular activities.
The author also gives some caution and states some concerns about the future of DL. One is that institutions should not be trying to control faculty/student work, merely accepting responsibility for it. Another is that there may be a tension between these repositories and other means of scholarly publication. A third is that institutions may try to create a repository, but lacking resources, does so out of pressure and does not do it justice. It needs to be a serious commitment to accept such responsibility. The message seems to be that digital institutional repositories may help many aspects of scholarly communication, but it may not (and maybe should not) be the answer across all disciplines.
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