Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
One of the details that struck me in the article is the fact that there are over 80,000 online journals. My guess is that since this article was published in 2005, there are now an even greater number of online journals. It’s interesting to think just how much digital libraries have changed over the course of the past 10-15 years, especially when you think of how much technology has changed in these years as well.
Dewey Meets Turing
First, I never imagined hearing that Digital Libraries have “sex appeal”. Awesome.
But seriously, before starting the program here at Pitt, I never imagined that the computer science field and library field were so closely related. The two go hand in hand. Digital libraries ultimately do change traditional librarianship. However, as the article writes, “the core function of librarianship remains”. We still are collectors and organizers of information, and we are still serving the needs of patrons. Digital libraries just change the way that this happens and what it looks like.
Institutional Repositories
Repository was a foreign word to me before the beginning of this semester. An institutional repository can be a great resource for faculty and students alike in a university (or other setting). Security is certainly an issue for repositories though, which cannot be overlooked. Repositories should not be formed haphazardly, but given great thought and planning before launched.
I think that there's something interesting in what you said about not imagining how closely related computer science and library science are. From my own experience and from what the article said, I feel like there was a point in the recent past where the goals and philosophies of computer scientists and librarians had maximum overlap, but that since then the big ideas in computer science have shifted toward things that librarians have been mostly resistant to--like decentralization and emergent taxonomies. I felt like I detected a tinge of resentment over this in the reading, but I also think that librarians are now starting to see the value in some of it.
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