Digital Libraries: Challenges & Influential Work
The Internet makes our job as librarians and archivists very difficult since we are responsible for searching through information that is hidden in cyberspace. Providing digital library services means that there needs to be a way for a user to sift through information in the digital environment and in order to do that some kind of order has to be made. The National Science Foundation was one of the first federal programs that supported digital library research when they funded six projects, called the Digital Libraries Initiative/DLI-1. DLI-2 came shortly after and involved many more federal organizations, such as the Library of Congress and FBI. The project kept evolving from there with more organizations and universities joining and bringing more money into researching digital libraries. The University of Illinois, for example, focused on the deployment and evaluation of journals in a digital form. They managed to provide publishers the opportunity to put their journals online. The Illinois Testbed project was used as publishers began utilizing HTML/CSS, internal linking with citations and footnotes, forward/backward links to related articles, amongst others. At the beginning of DLI-1 the prominent web browser was Mosaic 2.0 beta, Netscape Navigator wasn’t even used yet. Microsoft Windows 3.1 was the OS used most. The DLI program put into motion developing guidelines and standards for digital libraries, which have evolved themselves.
A search function was an important issue. Metasearch systems collect content within one search engine, like Google. Other search systems have broadcast search approaches. Metadata searching in comparison to full-text searching is an issue between the two search systems. The two could work together if broadcast searching developed standards and made the search function easier to understand for library users.
Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
The National Science Foundation began DLI in 1994. It was at first that digital libraries targeted librarians, computer scientists, and publishers, but that eventually grew beyond those three, especially when the Google search engine came about. Computer scientists usually are library fans, so a library’s function is easy for them to understand. Digital library projects gave them a project that combined research with helping society, plus they had to develop a totally new system. Librarians were open to this because the sciences are great supporters monetarily of libraries and knew that IT development was necessary so they could remain relevant with scholarly work. DLI seemed to be a union between CS and librarians, but the quick development of the web changed things. It made the consumer and producer line blurry and the common ground that the two had met upon. CS did not have a shift in their work really, but librarians were forced to take account of what would happen to their traditional roles. CS grew naturally with the internet and brought more to the field who were interested in the appeal of the web. There was a disruption in the library community, especially when publishers demanded a high price for digital content with their journals, many academic libraries could not afford the price and had to cancel subscriptions.
Downfalls to the partnership came in the lack of money that libraries received via DLI and thought CS didn’t realize the importance of their jobs and collections. CSers couldn’t understand why librarians wanted metadata. Information must still be organized and presented, which is a librarians duty. Now there calls for a partnership between librarians and scholarly authors.
When trying to access the third article I got a “404 error” page…which is comical because the end of the second article was a little anecdote on how much that annoys librarians. I’m guessing this wasn’t to be a joke, so I went ahead and googled it.
Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
In an academic archive it is giving the university community the ability to access digital materials created by the institution and related members. It is to preserve the university’s history. Librarians, IT professionals, archivists, records managers, faculty, and university administrators are the people that must work together to create this online repository. As technology changes access must continue and change with the technology. An institutional repository should have both faculty and student work, plus records of activities and events that went on at the university. It should acknowledge the development of the university through time and be available for others to see.
Scholarly community and scholarship are changing. Early members realized the opportunity of the internet to share ideas, whether in a scholarly journal or not. Some faculty members have looked to the internet to disseminate their works and provide their articles to a larger audience. If they are not involved with the scholarly world then they are responsible for looking over the content and making sure access remains. Metadata needs to be watched over, as well. This is a difficult task as faculty are not used to maintaining their records, only creating them. It makes these materials easy to get lost. Another issue is in preserving the scholarly record within the scholarship realm, which many faculty members are not familiar with doing. Scholarship has become more of datasets and analysis tools.
Institutional repositories have other duties such as developing a new collection strategy and put materials there that might be useful to research libraries. They can facilitate access to traditional scholarly work over the internet and have an easier system implemented for submitting materials.
Some dangers over institutional repositories include deciding what is intellectual work, not overloading the systems, and making sure the institutions they are at will commit to their importance. Overtime they can easily fail if they run out of money, management declines, or technical problems arise. Their mission is to preserve institution materials, provide reference services to these materials, and manage the rights to the digital content.
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