Week 11 Readings

So it seems I have been way out of order in doing the blogs and readings. I remember Dr. He saying that the order of content was going to be switched, but when I went to do the readings I completely forgot. I did the readings by the date of them in courseweb and not the order I was supposed to. I hope this won't negatively effect my grade as I have done all of them the past 3 weeks just in the wrong order. It seems that I should be back on track for week 12 and it was only the last 3 weeks that were out of order.

This weeks readings were interesting and on a topic I enjoy. It was a little different since I am out of order and we have already discussed this topic in class, but I still thought the readings were good to read, even if they were late.

1.) Mischo, Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work

Effective search and discovery over open and hidden digital resources is still problematic and challenging. There are differences between providing digital access to collections and actually providing digital library services. This is a very good point, and I liked it a lot. Just simply providing access to a lot of digital collections does not mean you are providing digital library services.

The first significant federal investment into digital library research was in 1994. There has recently been a surge in interest in metasearch or federated search by many different people and institutions. The majority of the rest of this article discussed previous and current research being done in digital libraries and the instiutions doing them.

2.)Paepcke, et al. Dewey Meets Turing

In 1994 the NSF launched the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), which united libraries and computer scientists together to work on the project. The invention and growth of the World Wide Web changed many of their initial ideas. The web very instantly blurred the distinction between the consumers and the producers of information.

One point in the article I found very interesting was the fact that the computer scientists didn't like all the restictions placed upon them by the publishers. They were not allowed to make public all of their work, becuase that would then make public all of the materials in it (i.e. the publishers copyrighted material). This is interesting because it showed the light of all the digital copyright laws to people that may not have understood all the restrictions.

3.) Lynch Institutional Repositories

Institutional repositories are a new strategy that allows universitites to accelerate changes in scholarship and scholarly communication. The author defines instituional repositories as a set of services 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. This includes preservation of materials when needed, organization, and access or distribution. He thinks a good IR should contain materials from both faculty and students and both research and training materials.

Universities are not doing a good job facilitating new forms of scholarly communication. Faculty are better at creating ideas, not being system administrators and dissemenators of their works. IR's could solve these problems. They address both questions of short term access and long term preservation, and have the advantage of being able to maintain data as well.

The author sees some problems where IR's can go astray or become counterproductive: if the IR is made for administration to exercise control over what had been a faculty controlled work; one can't overload the infrastructure with distracting and irrelevant policies; and don't implelment the IR's hasitly. Just because other universities are implementing new IR's doesn't mean you should rush into it and start one yourself. These are points the author believes universities need to look closely at when implementing institutional repositories.

IR's promote progress in infrastructure standards in many different ways, the author gives three examples. Preservable formats - the things in the IR should be preserved, different institutions will do this in different ways though. Identifiers - reference materials in IR's will be important in scholarly dialogue and record. Rights Documents and Management - management of rights for digital materials will be essential. You need a way to document rights and permissions of the works.

I liked the article on IR's the best. I'm interested in the many advantages of institutional repositories and how to best implement them and this article was extremely informative