Week One Readings

The power to define, to name something, is often overlooked, and the readings for our first week do an excellent job of showing this. Borgman, Candela, et al, and Paepcke, et al show the tension between librarians and computer scientists in their efforts to set agendas around the term “digital library.” Borgman's definition is politically astute, explicitly linking digital libraries to their bricks and mortar predecessors, writing “they are an extension, enhancement, and integration of a variety of information institutions as physical places where resources are selected, collected, organized, preserved, and accessed in support of a user community.”
Candela offers an excellent overview of what goes into a digital library, and the figures were a helpful addition to the text.
Lupovici (pdf), meanwhile, writes from a librarian's perspective on what must seem to some as the changing of the guard, moving online at the expense of tangible objects. Like Borgman, she reassures readers by discussing how virtual and physical libraries compliment each other.