Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
This article describes discusses the the powerful tools we have to access resources and the changes that are happening to make access more efficient. It is a good history lesson in how digital libraries really came about and how federal funds played a big part in what we have to work with now and what we will have in the future. I think it was very forward-thinking (which I don't normally say about the government) of the federal government to work with the NSF and NASA to fund DLI. A lot of technologies that complement the activities funded by the DLI were not federally funded too.
Federated searching seems to be an important issue that still needs to be addressed now.
One thing I was curious about in the article was how it discussed metadata searching v. full-text searching. I wonder if Google is doing or looking into being able to conduct both types of searching.
The last issue the article mentions are library portals and how the NISO Metasearch Initiative is trying to develop standards for libraries to have one-search access to multiple resources through an easy Google-type page. I sometimes have difficulty searching, for instance, the CLP site and think sometimes that it's too busy and takes too many clicks to actually get to what is needed. Having an easier way to search all of the data bases at one time would be a very good thing, especially since a lot of people are used to this type of searching/retrieving.
Dewey Meets Turing
This article sort of pits computer scientists against librarians and then resolves the issues each discipline faces in working together in the world of the DLI. It appears that both sides want to hold on to their traditional roles and still be able to move forward together and by the end of the article, it is clear that this is possible and is currently happening. Librarians of the future will be working even more closely with computer scientists in the emergent institutional repository realm, for instance. All librarians will have to be more forward-thinking and proactive to help find solutions to some problems that still remain and to know that they still have a very viable and important job to do, just like the computer scientists.
Institutional Repositories
Lynch wrote a very interesting article that stemmed from a talk he gave at a workshop on insitutional repositories and their role in scholarship. It does seem like institutional repositories, if handled properly, could really increase collaboration between different universities, especially when it comes to data sharing, etc. Right now, these collaborations can be very costly and unweildly, especially in medicine, where data bases, etc. have to be run and funded (sometimes at very high cost) through the grant. The money that could be saved here could be used for more actual research.
Another interesting thing about the article was the discussion of the increase in traditional journal articles having supplementary materials published online. This is both a blessing and a curse. The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, has been doing this for a while now and has slowly gotten better with: 1) actually making it very clear in the article that there is some supplementary material available; and 2) being able to find and access this information well after the publication date. It appears that the supplementary material will be forever linked with the actual article. However, when one downloads the PDF of the article itself, the supplementary information is not there. A better system would have it all in the same file and then with the option for the user to print/save the supplementary material. Right now, the system is still a bit burdensome. Perhaps a better system would be to have all of this information in the author's institutional repository but then the question arises, would outsiders have access to it? Would the journal subscribers?
Just like Lynch mentions, institutional repositories have to be set up so as to further and enhance scholarly work, not make it more burdensome.
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3 comments:
I often wonder how many people think that searching IS full text searching. Wouldn't it be great though for libraries to be the portals to this information? I really think this is the where this federated searching belongs. I do like Google and I think the people who founded it and are running it are great people, but I'd like to see this area be on the non-profit side.
I read you loud and clear on trying to get people to look at the IR's. I mean I know my boss can't even get through her journals. They all just pile up! I know that the PA digital library does update all the IR's in PA, but I mean that is only here. I don't think there is a big storehouse of this IR data, and their should be. MY JDC is indexed in Google and yahoo, but that still isn't a place where they could just have an RSS feed to keep them updated. There is no real way to search them unless you already know its out there!
I agree with much of what you posted this week. I also think many library websites are WAY too click happy when it comes to finding what you need. My own library is guilty of it too. I attended a conference where libraries demonstrated their own link resolvers that they had developed in-house. You searched for an item and were taken to the full-text, a location guide with your item's location marked, or an interlibrary loan form in two clicks maximum. It was great!
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