Week 11 Reading Notes

Digital Libraries, Challenges and Influential Work:
Digital Libraries are essentially different from merely a digital collection. A Digital Library is an online version of what we think of when we think of a library, a portal that attempts to emulate all the services and features of a library in a digital environment.
The Digital Library Initiative started in the the US in the early 90s was the first push by the federal government to back research into Digital Libraries by computer scientists and librarians.

Dewey Meets Turing:
In the beginning of the DLI, the computer scientists and libraries involved had different expectations involved of what Digital Libraries and Digital Collections would be, how they would be accessed and how they would be implemented. The World Wide Web would swing the favor towards computer scientists, the idea of what a true library collection would be would seem obsolete as with regards to the Web, and digital content, directly marketed and available to the consumer with no library in the middle, would be very possible and very appealing.
However we have seen that the library and the services the library provides is not wholly obsolete, and too the collection model is still viable and necessary even as far as the Web goes. Digital Libraries can still function and operate under similar models that traditional librarianship and library science espouse.

Institutional Repositories: 
A key place for librarianship to extend and be viable in the digital realm is with the creation and stewardship of Institutional Repositories. Here librarians and libraries make available the resources for creating digital collections to their institutional members, and then guarantee that these digital collections will be maintained  and preserved, including migration through technological change, be it software or hardware.
To quote Lynch directly from his article:
"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, and that a primary responsibility of our universities is to exercise stewardship over these riches: both to make them available and to preserve them. "