Reading Notes for Week 11

Lynch- ARL Article (Institutional Repositories)

I really liked Lynch's clear explanation of his idea of an institutional repository- I just wish he had provided it before the middle of the article. I also liked his suggestion that educational institutions make an effort to digitize some work of their students and faculty (like dissertations) and make them available. As ILL coordinator, I receive several requests for theses or dissertations daily. Many institutions do not lend the hard copies, so these requests have to be denied or purchased at a high cost. He mentioned MIT's dSpace. I had tried to use that several years ago when it must have been in its earliest form. I could never find anything that I needed, so I had seen look at the site in years. I followed the link provided in the article and the interface looks much better. I look forward to giving it another whirl.

Digital Libraries- Challenges and Influential Work
Our library has applied for a grant so that we may digitze and make accessible our large of collection of Southern Episcopal and Civil War History. I truly hope that it will go beyond just a collection of scanned images and documents. Granted our project is is much smaller than the projects profiled, but it is interesting to see those who went before. I truly hope that it will go beyond just a collection of scanned images and documents. I think we could incorporate a simpler version Mischo's mentions of internal linking between citations and footnotes, forward and backward links to cited articles using DOIs and Open URLs and make the scholar/patron's efforts much more fruitful.

Dewey Meets Turing
I didn't know that the idea of modern digital libraries stretched back to the early 1990's, I thought that it was a more recent idea. His point about the metaphorical struggle between metadata and algorithms was interesting and still true to some extent.