Readings: Week 13 (11/24)

I'm not sure which readings were supposed to be for this week, so I did the ones that I have not yet done for November...

Challenges and Influential Work- It was interesting to see where a lot of the early digital libraries came from and why they were developed. However, this article got a bit technical for me with a lot of terms and concepts with which I am unfamiliar. It was interesting that they mentioned Google Scholar as a goal to live up to for institutions. I admit that I frequently use the site, but like someone brought up in the digital libraries class, you cannot access much of the content you find through Google with out either paying or being part of an institution who already subscribes to the databases.

Dewey meets Turing- It was interesting to look at some of the tensions that emerged between librarians and computer scientists when digital libraries were first on the scene. Though I really agree with the statement that "the core function of librarianship remains. I think it would be very difficult to completely replace a librarian with only a computer. There is often too much to reference questions to leave it fully up to a computer, which does not understand the context of what the person is looking for.

Institutional Repositories- This seemed to be a good intro to some of the issues surrounding digital repositories. I thought it was especially interesting that the author argued that digital repositories should not be treated as journals. He seemed to argue that peer review was an unnecessary process in that environment. However, I disagree, if just anyone could publish whatever they wanted, not only would the prestige of publishing disappear, but the value of information in digital repositories would likely decrease.