Digital libraries seemed to really be targeted towards the scholarly field with the creation of the Digital Libraries Initiative. Universities began creating databases of specified fields as what seemed alternatives to the systems controlled by vendors. The beauty of these systems was the way they could be organized and searched. As the article, Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work said, the invention of the Open Archives initiative as a protocol helped to make these digital libraries uniform. Institutional Repositories went into greater detail about the use and structure of repositories or digital libraries. Mentioned several times was the concept of "federation" which allows inter-searching of the different repositories, sharing of resources.
The second D-Lib article Dewey Meets Turing, showed how librarians and computer scientists have come together to create these digital libraries and the challenges that have come with working between the two fields. This was very interesting to me and I wonder how much of a continued struggle there is between these two worlds? So much now of library work has to do with the digital world, that it is almost necessary to have the technical background.
I appreciated the point the authors made in this article that "the core of librarianship has remained." That is, while things have moved to the digital world, there is still a need for organization, collocation and presentation of the resources. Librarians working to harness the benefits of the digital while bringing the foundation of librarianship which has been so valuable for so long is a needed skill and will make the future of information gathering and accessing all the more valuable.
This week I commented on http://oliverlis2600.blogspot.com/ and http://nicplana.blogspot.com/
12 years ago
