Week Eleven Readings

Are we talking about actual digital libraries here, on the online components/extensions of brick-and-mortar libraries?

Seems like the latter in the first article, which sums up university efforts to digitize and make (parts of) their collections available online.
I thought the UI attempt at adding mark-ups to footnotes in journals was pretty cool – a very good idea since reference librarians (and me) tell patrons to keep following the sources and citations when researching.
There wasn’t much mention of what happens when for-profits get into the act, like GoogleScholar, Ex Libris and the like.

The next article talks about the Digital Libraries Initiative, a 1994 project by the National Science Foundation, which was complicated by the explosion of the web. I don’t have much to say about it, although I enjoyed the cheeky tone of the piece.

Institutional repositories are “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” It’s important to note that repositories are not static; as technology changes, so must they, if only to make sure that the information they contain is legible and readable to future generations.
I also liked that Lynch mentioned the rights of faculty, the producers, in repositories, as well as the role that OAI can play.

Fun fact, you can see my undergraduate honor’s thesis at Colby’s digital archive.

Final note: I wonder what are the implications of these public-private partnerships that Lynch talks about?