Reading Notes

1) Mischo, W. (July/August 2005). Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).
      This very short article about the evolution of digital libraries was informative, but it focused mainly on which companies were giving the most funding to the developing projects and a very basic overview of some of those projects. I think it is interesting that effective searching is still a phenomenal hurdle for the digital library community, but from the perspective of both a user and an administrator (to a certain extent) I can understand why it remains a challenge. I am confused about the query that Mischo poses, "Whether digital library work will continue to be interesting to the computer science community at large." If not, who will continue to work on it? Additionally, what will be of interest to the computer science community? I know they have a bevy of things to occupy their time, but I am just curious.

2) Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005). Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).
     I am glad to see that the relationship between digital librarianship and computer science is on the mend and not as exclusive as some would make it seem. The history of libraries and computer sciences before the advent of the World Wide Web was not quite known to me and this article does a great job of sharing that history succinctly. In addition, the point at which the two diverged and the reseaming are summed up quite nicely. The authors' quote, "Now, if only ACM librarians would stop making computer scientists choose content descriptors from a controlled vocabulary of terms..." is fairly amusing to me considering the debates we have had in other classes about this very issue.

3) Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.
       The evolution of institutional repositories must continue and administrators must figure out ways in which to incorporate new networking systems. I think this article is very much on point about not only the challenges that face institutional repositories in the areas of collection development and access, but also the initial steps any institution must take in order to be relevant to both their patrons and donors. "To summarize, institutional repositories can facilitate greatly enhanced access to traditional scholarly content by empowering faculty to effectively use the new dissemination capabilities offered by the network." I think this is a very true statement and I am interested in seeing if institutional repositories continue to advance towards these goals.