Current info environment includes: "full-text repositories maintained by commercial and professional society publishers; preprint servers and Open Archive Initiative (OAI) provider sites; specialized Abstracting and Indexing (A & I) services; publisher and vendor vertical portals; local, regional, and national online catalogs; Web search and metasearch engines; local e-resource registries and digital content databases; campus institutional repository systems; and learning management systems"
Need more than access for digital library work - need federated search
History of digital libraries:
- Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI-1), 1994
- DLI-2, 1998
- University-led projects
- Development strongly influenced by evolution of Internet
- Search interoperability and federated searching
-Google, Google Scholar, OAI = aggregated/harvested
-Ex Libris Metalib, Endeavor Encompass, and WebFeat = broadcast search
-can be complementary
Metadata searching vs. full-text searching?
This article was a good, brief introduction to the issues surrounding federated search and why such a mechanism is necessary. I can't imagine how complicated it is to try to design a search that will encompass all of the different resources available online. It seems like it would be impossible to design something that would work with all the different systems that exist, but I also see the need for it in order to provide the best possible in digital library services.
Dewey Meet Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
DLI led to development of Google, as well as CareMedia and many others
Computer scientists: expected their research to impact daily lives
Librarians: expected grant money and impact on scholarship
Expected to be collaboration between computer scientists and librarians, but World Wide Web got in the way
-variety of media, larger collection, different access methods
-blurred consumers/producers of info
-split up collections over the world and under different owners
Computer scientists embraced changes Web created
Librarians felt threat to their traditional practice
Problems for librarians:
- Loss of cohesive "collections"
- High prices of journal publishers
- Copyright issues
- Dead links
Computer scientists feel librarians too nitpicky about metadata
-However, core function of librarianship remains
-Notion of collections in reemerging (hubs)
-Opportunities for direct connections between librarians and scholarly authors
This article provided an interesting account of the tensions between librarians and computer scientists involved in the DLI. I can understand how these two professions planned to work together to create digital libraries, but that the Internet changed everything, as it has in so many areas. I can see how computer scientists and librarians have different perspectives and goals, but I also am glad that the author sees hope for the future of these professions working together and also of the practice of collection development.
Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
Libraries taking more active role in promoting scholarship and scholarly communication
Supporting this strategy:
- Lower online storage costs
- Open archives metadata harvesting
- Free, publicly accessible journal articles
Institutional repository = set of services university offers for management and dissemination of digital materials created by institution and community members
-Preservation
-Organization
-Access/distribution
Contains:
- Intellectual works by faculty and students
- Documentation of activities of institution
- Experimental and observation data
Authorship in digital medium
-traditional journal articles or new forms
Institutional repositories can help scholars with system administration activities and content curation
-problem with preservation
Traditional publishing = new supplementary datasets and analysis tools
Institutional repositories can:
- enhance access
- encourage new forms of scholarly communication
- maintain stewardship of data
- preserve supplemental info
- curate records of institutional activity
- Institutions could take control instead of scholars
- Weighed down with policy
- Lack of institutional commitment
- Technical problems
Future developments:
Consortial or cluster institutional repositories
Curatorial and policy control
Federating institutional repositories
Community or public repositories
I like the way that this article outlines the opportunities and responsibilities of an institutional repository. It seems to me that every institution such as a university should have such a repository in order to organize and preserve digital information that could be important in the future. It would be against an institution's mission to lose some of its vital records and/or intellectual work and have to reinvent the wheel all the time or have a limited knowledge of past activities. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future of institutional repositories and if the author of this article is correct.
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