Digital Libraries:Challenges and Influential Work
This article gave a breif history of the development of digital libraries. There seemed to be very strong government funding in the early 90's for these projects. I wonder how much government funding is still being allocated to this research and development. I also thought that it was interesting that the author recognized Google-Scholar as legitimate competition for digital libraries. I often wonder about the long-term ramifications of having large amounts of academic research material in the hands of corporate scum.
Dewey meets Turing
It seems like the Librarian/Computer Scientist relationship was a match made in heaven. But, just like any relationship, you let her move in and she steals your dog and throws away your recliner. Or in this case, misunderstands the importance of metadata and considers collection development "quaint".
On a more serious note, this article was pretty cool. There is definatly a lot to be learned from these two disciplines. I think that as more library school move to the ISchool format the focus on computer science will become even more apparent than it already is.
Institutional Repositories
The possiblities with institutional repositories are very exciting. I think that broader dissemination of scholarly communication is very important, especially in a peer-review setting. It can also be helpful to prevent plagarism. Apparently my undergraduate university had a database of student papers that could be searched against current papers for plagarism. I'm not sure if this was ever used, but several professors used it as a scare tactic. One problem I always had, and I'm glad the author mentioned, was the fact that the University was keeping my intellectual property. I wondered if they had copyright over my material, according to the aforementioned professors we signed some nature of waiver allowing them to database our papers, but I don't remember reading that.
3 comments:
I too wonder how ownership and copyright works in the university setting. Granted, I'm not planning on anything I produce at school to really mean anything, but what about serious scholars?
It did seem useful when I made movies and other projects for my undergrad program - especially when my soundtracks were nothing but songs I like. Then it was useful to put "copyright Miami University" at the end of the credits ... even though they never reached a wider audience than local public access.
I kind of think your professors were screwing with you. Like how camp counselors would tell you that there was a special chemical in the swimming pool that would create a bright red ring around you if you peed in the pool and everyone would KNOW.
Really though -- I would also be interested in how much financial investment our gov't has in digital libraries now, or if they've just let Google take over everything. I think that having academic research available to evil corporations is not as bad as corporations suppressing research from the public, though. Not that pharmaceutical companies don't do that constantly.
I thought that pee ring was supposed to be bright green (according to Pete and Pete, anyway).
Justin, yes, I think the centralized DL will create impossible expectations for public libraries. However, I'm hoping that DLs will be interconnected enough that individual libraries won't have to abandon their in-house user services in favor of devoting time to developing DL. I am also hoping that there will be enough resistance from technology-fearing patrons that their public libraries will be forced to invest in on-site user services.
Also, in case you haven't gotten the message yet, your bag is in Anthony's trunk.
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