Reading Notes - Nov. 10th

Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
- Federal programmatic support for digital library research was formulated in a series of community-based planning workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1993-1994.
- 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.
- Effective search and discovery over the digital resources on the Internet remains a problematic and challenging task.
- Huge difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections and providing digital library services. To address this, information providers have designed enhanced gateway and navigation services on the interface side and also introduced federation mechanisms to assist users.

Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative.
- For computer scientists NSF's Digital Library 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.  The Initiative would finally be a way for much needed funds.
- Information technologies were indeed important to ensure libaries' continued impact on scholarly work.
- The embrace of the Web by computer scientists was natural because the linkage of information is a much employed concept in computer programming.
- Information accession now rests on a highly technical infrastructure, the core function of librarianship remains. Info must be organized, collated, and presented.
- Notion of collections is spontaneously re-emerging.
- Opportunities now arise for direct connections between librarians and scholarly.

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
- Online storage costs have dropped significantly and repositories are now affordable.
- Some progress has been made on the standards for the underlying metadata.
- An institutional repository is a recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our universities will be increasingly represented, documented, and shared in digital form.
- Scholarship and scholarly communication are changing.
- Revolution in scholarly communications is not limited to the development of new generes of scholarly works that are enabled by the digital medium.