Readings Week #11

Two of this week's readings were about digital libraries and one was about institutional repositories.
Digital Libraries Challenges and Influential Work
Federal support funded the Digital Library Initiative, DLI-1 in 1994 and DLI-2 in 1998. The purpose of the DLI projects were to make large scale digital resources and collections accessible and interoperable. University led teams worked with commercial vendors and software companies to define and identitfy important document, data, and metadata standards and protocols for Web based searching. The DLI program contributed to the development of best practices. Significant technology was transferred from this program. A spin off from DLI program resulted in Google.
Dewey Meets Turing Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
This article discussed the association of the National Science Foundation with the Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994 . It also mentioned that Google emerged from funded work. This article dealt mainly with the relationships between Librarians and Computer Scientists as a result of their working together on Digital Libray projects. Publishers are also mentioned as interested parties to Digital Library development. According to this article the DLI project is seen as broadening opportunities for library science since the core functions of librarianship, organizing, collating and presenting information still need to be preformed.
Institutional Depositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
This article concerned the need for universities to move beyond their historically passive roles of supporting publishers and into the development and maintenance of digital repositories. Recent technological trends and developments, such as the drop in online storage costs and standards development, have made this possible. The development of an institutional repository requires collaboration among the institution's community as well as a commitment to organization, access, distribution, and long term preservation of digital materials produced by its members. In this article an institutional repository is seen as "complement and a supplement rather than a substitute for traditional scholarly publication venues." This author of this article warns of possible problems with institutional repositories, among which are the problems associated with material loss due to technical failure. Little built in system redundancy is also mentioned.