W. Mischo, "Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Repositories
The WWW is so vast that finding and retrieving information can be daunting. The huge number of repositories, preprint servers, open archives, abstracting and indexing services, and vendor portals makes retrieving desired scholarly information especially cumbersome. Information providers have been attempting to create coherent "digital libraries" out of this mess to make IR easier. Funding and technology are essential for this task. Some institutions have displayed measures of success in this process.
A. Paepcke, "Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative"
The National Science Foundation started its Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) in 1994. This has led to much collaboration between librarians and computer scientists. Their goals have been to create functional digital libraries. However, the World Wide Web has introduced a new twist in their plans by immersing them in an overabundance of information. It has proven difficult to integrate web content into digital libraries. Additionally, the serials pricing crisis has been another blow to creating digital libraries because of the limitations it puts on cash-strapped librarians. Still, it is worth focusing on the fact that regardless of technology changes and the serials crisis, "the core function of librarianship remains."
C. Lynch, "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age"
Institutional repositories are presenting a new method of promoting scholarly communication. Repositories are now a very affordable option since prices for maintaining the technology infrastructure have come down and are now reasonable. MIT is one institutions that has led the way in developing online repositories. The idea behind such repositories is to allow universities to keep a record of their scholarship and to share it with the wider community.
Thank you for posting your reading notes as summaries. I found them helpful in gathering my thoughts on the readings for this week. As for the Lynch reading, i found it interesting that the repositories are affordable, and yet I don't think there are very many institutions that rely on these repositories instead of going through a publisher for their faculty research.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the previous commenter that you did a good job summarizing the articles. Some of the articles were a little dense, and it is refreshing to see a clearly written and succinct summary of them. Thanks!
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