Week 10 notes

1) 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
This article gives a background of some of the early digital library projects.  It was interesting to read about the DLI-1 and DLI-2 because I had never heard of them.  I thought it was interesting, and the article pointed this out, that the Internet was still pretty new when the DLI-1 began.  This shows that many organizations were interested in moving libraries forward as the Internet came about.  People think of libraries as old-school, dusty old places with books, but now they are increasingly right beside or part of developing these technologies.  We just need to market ourselves to change the perception.


It was also interesting to note that many network developments have happened outside of federally/grant-funded ventures.  So many see the value in these systems.

2) 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
This article is important because it discusses the relationship/merger between librarians and computer scientists.  At the time, most librarians did not know very much about these systems, and they needed computer science to make sure they didn't get "left behind" as information and the world went digital. It was interesting to note the resentment the librarians felt about the computer scientists "hijacking" the money, but computer scientists felt librarians were focusing on the wrong things, like metadata and collection development.  The article point out, though, that the "core" of librarianship remains: "The information must be organized, collated, and presented."

3) Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml
This article discusses institutional repositories.  I had never heard that term, but once the author defined it, I knew what they were.  ("...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.")  The most important thing I drew out of this article is how we organize the exponentially exploding amount of information.  In LIS 2000, Dr. Tomer talked about how many people publish scholarly works each year, and how few of those works are read or used by anyone after they are published.  (Something like 2% or less.)  We have to deal with archiving this, or decide whether it is worth archiving.  Who has that power or knowledge, though?  Metadata can help us better organize the information, which is probably why we discussed it in this class.  I didn't really grasp how important metadata is until reading this article.  Without metadata, the information is just loaded into these repositories without a good way to find anything.