Digital Libraries Readings

Andreas Paepcke, et al, “Dewey Meets Turing”

Are Google’s original algorithms really derived from DLI? Where’s the reference?

There isn’t enough background to understand what’s going on in this article. It precludes an advanced understanding of DLI. For instance, what do publishers have to do with anything? I thought it was an NSF project.

           

William H. Mischo, “Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work”

Oops. I guess I needed to read this first before “Dewey Meets Turing.” Now everything makes slightly more sense except the software companies. If you already have a fleet of computer scientists used to building things from the ground up (as “Dewey Meets Turing” mentions) what added value did restricting the final product add? Especially if you were just going to have to use government funds again to buy it back.

Clifford A. Lynch, “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”

Are institutional repositories not succeeding because of policy, management failure, or technical problems? It doesn’t seem like it, at least not in the way Lynch means it. Instead, the problem seems to be that the old system works for faculty, and therefore if it works why fix it? They have no incentive to use an IR. Publishing occurs for a variety of reasons and only one of them is accessibility. The others like prestige, job promotion, and other concerns are equally important issues to address. Lynch has got all the technological bases covered, but misses the human element of getting people to use IRs.