Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
While I enjoyed the second article more than this one, what I found interesting in this one was the list of all the digital library standards and technologies that emerged outside the federally funded research, including Oracle, Yahoo, Fedora and Ex Libris MetaLib. Some good did come out of the federally supported projects, including Google, but it makes one wonder whether these things would have emerged on there own without government intervention and strictly supported by consumer supply and demand.
FYI:
armamentarium: the aggregate of equipment, methods, and techniques available to one for carrying out one's duties (I had never seen this word before.)
Dewey Meets Turing
What an interesting article. While librarians and computer scientists were busy trying to figure out how to collect and disseminate digital information, the Web exploded, bringing an unprecedented amount of information that no one ever expected to factor into the equation. I love the contrast between the roles of librarian and computer scientist. This article seems to provide a respectful overview of both positions without pointing fingers at who's wrong and who's right. And the conclusion is hopeful for both sides.
Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
"At the most basic and fundamental level, an institutional repository is a recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our universities will increasingly be represented, documented, and shared in digital form, and that a primary responsibility of our universities is to exercise stewardship (emphasis mine) over these riches: both to make them available and to preserve them."
Scholarship in the digital age is a tricky proposition: those producing the content want it widely available, they want recognition (and often payment) for the work and they want the work preserved. Making this scholarship available and preserving it at the university level just makes sense. If this is something that a university is going to take on, they must ensure they are doing it properly and for the right reasons.
Melissa, I also thought that the creation of "Oracle, Yahoo, Fedora and Ex Libris MetaLib" and Google through the governments help was really great. I was also thinking about your question of if such entities would have been created without government intervention. Maybe not at that time, but now that others see the profits that were gained from their creation, I think that now these types of programs can and will be created without government help.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that other those entities would not have been created without government help at that time, but I do think that they would have been created eventually as the market for their services grew and continues to grow to a certain extent. Now the question becomes would they have developed in the same way they did?
ReplyDeleteMelissa, I had the same question about the non-federally funded research in digital libraries. I believe that research would have taken place even without the government due to the incentives for such research. The second article we read even mentioned some of these. The fact that computer scientists could satisfy their desire for contributing to society and the benefits to their own research that digital libraries provide.
ReplyDeleteI really don't think that project would have been as successful without federal funding mostly because of infrastructure. DLI parts one & two were funded via NSA, FBI, & DARPA whose network helped form the basis for the internet. I do think Yahoo, Google, etc. would have happened without federal help, but 5 years later and probably very expensive if made available to consumers.
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