week 11 readings

Digital Libraries Challenges and Influential Work
To effectively search all digital resources over the internet remains a problem filled and challenging task. People have been working to turn the vast amount of digital collections into true digital libraries. "Federal programmatic support for digital library research was formulated in a series of community-based planning workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1993-1994." "The first significant federal investment in digital library research came in 1994 with the funding of six projects under the auspices of the Digital Libraries Initiative (now called DLI-1) program" After the DLI-1 They created a DLI-2. "In aggregate, between 1994 and 1999, a total of $68 million in federal research grants were awarded under DLI-1 and DLI-2." "DLI-1 funded six university-led projects to develop and implement computing and networking technologies that could make large-scale electronic test collections accessible and interoperable." Several of the projects examined issues connected with federation. "There has been a surge of interest in metasearch or federated search technologies by vendors, information content providers, and portal developers. These metasearch systems employ aggregated search (collocating content within one search engine) or broadcast searching against remote resources as mechanisms for distributed resource retrieval. Google, Google Scholar and OAI search services typify the aggregated or harvested approach."

Dewey Meets Turing Libraries, Computer Scientists, and the digital libraries
The google search engine emerged from the funded work of the DLI. An interesting aspect of the DLI was how it united librarians and computer scientist. "For computer scientists NSF's DL Initiative provided a framework for exciting new work that was to be informed by the centuries-old discipline and values of librarianship" "For librarians the new Initiative was promising from two perspectives. They had observed over the years that the natural sciences were beneficiaries of large grants, while library operations were much more difficult to fund and maintain. The Initiative would finally be a conduit for much needed funds." "...the Initiative understood that information technologies were indeed important to ensure libraries' continued impact on scholarly work." "The Web's advent significantly changed many plans. The new phenomenon's rapid spread propelled computer scientists and libraries into unforeseen directions. Both partners suddenly had a somewhat undisciplined teenager on their hands without the benefit of prior toddler-level co-parenting." "The Web not only blurred the distinction between consumers and producers of information, but it dispersed most items that in the aggregate should have been collections across the world and under diverse ownership. This change undermined the common ground that had brought the two disciplines together."

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
"The development of institutional repositories emerged as a new strategy that allows universities to apply serious, systematic leverage..." Many things have made this possible such as the price of online storage costs dropping and the Open archives metadata harvesting protocol. "The leadership of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the development and deployment of the DSpace institutional repository system http://www.dspace.org/, created in collaboration with the Hewlett Packard Corporation, has been a model pointing the way forward for many other universities." "... a university-based institutional repository is 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." "At the most basic and fundamental level, an institutional repository is a recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our universities will increasingly be represented, documented, and shared in digital form." The author includes another use for IR's and some cautions as well. ". I have argued that research libraries must establish new collection development strategies for the digital world, taking stewardship responsibility for content that will be of future scholarly importance..." The article ends by mentioning the future of IR.