Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Week 11 - Social Issues

Borgman - Social Aspects of Digital Libraries

The great value from this early piece is summed up from these two sentences:

#1. Digital libraries are a set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching, and using information.

#2. Digital libraries are constructed -- collected and organized -- by a community of users, and their functional capabilities support the information needs and uses of that community.

I am glad that, as early as 1996, researchers called for an empirical approach to digital library design, with a focus on users!

Roush - Infinite Library

This piece correctly pointed out three directions which Google's digitization project can go:

Door One - a private firm begins to purchase rights to things already in the public domain, in order to privatize them

Door Two - Parallel public and private databases coexist peacefully. Google could keep one copy of each library's collection for itself and give away the other copy.

Door Three - Private companies offer commercial access to digital books while public entities, such as libraries, are allowed to provide free access for research and scholarship.
I love this quote: "Libraries and publishing have always existed in the physical world without damaging each other; in fact, they support each other. What we would like to see is this tradition not die with this digital transformation."

Arms - A Viewpoint Analysis of the Digital Library

Again, a great emphasis on the user's perspective in light of interoperability.

Muddiest Point:  I have no questions this week - everything was easy to understand.

No comments:

Post a Comment