11/15 Reading Notes

Lynch’s “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”

                In archives and records management, I often hear the words “institutional repository” being used to describe places where records are stored, preserved, and managed.   Lynch has developed his own definition that is similar in purpose but broader in what is managed (digital materials) and in who maintains it (librarians, information technologists, archives and records managers, faculty, administrators, etc.)   It takes the responsibilities of records management and applies it directly to digital material (and specifically universities.)   Scholarship has certainly evolved in the digital age and it offers both opportunities to document these changes as well as challenges in figuring out how to do so, especially when those scholars doing the communicating are less concerned with managing it themselves.  While I agree with Lynch that the “complex, cumbersome ‘gate keeping’” policies can be a deterrent, I disagree that “simple, low-barrier-to-submission” is the solution.  Simple, yes; low-barrier, no.  As archives and records managers have already learned, ambiguous collection policies can lead to a glut of unnecessary and unusable information.  Lynch’s foreboding conclusion that future failures are likely to lead to a great loss of information also does not offer much confidence in the system.   

Mischo’s “Digital Libraries: Challenges and influential Works”

                This article shows that, while there are still many challenges to effective search and discovery of digital resources, there are many institutions and companies trying to tackle the problem and in many different ways.  It is impressive how many publishers now provide online journal titles which I would assume means that, despite worries that online versions are killing print sources, publishers do see this as a valid and useful dissemination tool.  I also find it interesting how search and retrieval techniques are being compared to Google which says a lot about how people like to search and the power of Google.

Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley’s “Dewey Meets Turning: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries initiative”

                I found this article both informative and entertaining.  It is interesting to read about both sides of the story between librarians and computer scientist after “And then the Web happened…” particularly about how both sides viewed the same issues (such as information retrieval) from different points of view.  The Web caused an explosion of information to scatter across the far reaches of the globe.  Librarians and computers scientist are trying to find ways to organize this chaos into something we can use.  Librarians do it the traditional way with categorization and computer scientists do it with linking.  While this has lead to some tensions between the two, this article makes me believe that we are trying to work things out.