Week 11 Readings

Digital Libraries:


Digital collections are capable of holding a wide variety of content from plain text files to .gif and .jpg images, pdf, and WAV audo/video files. The efforts of several government and industry programs are currently engaged in compiling content from the world wide web for inclusion in digital archives. Access to these archives has not been conclusively determined. One example of a digital library that is free to access is Google Scholar.

Dewey Meets Turning:

From the prospective of Librarians the NSF's DL Initiative was a avenue to new funding and a way to experience new technologies. For the computer science professionals the partnership would mean a step into the social markets served by Libraries. What Paepcke calls a "Cuckoo's Egg" was the advent of the WWW and its proliferation of on-demand, open access information delivery. Here is the implied threat to computer science and library functions appears in which non-technical minded individuals with access to simple home computer can call up detailed content web pages from any server on the WWW.
I think society is still struggling to embrace the scope of the WWW and to a lesser degree the Net. How do different cultural groups assimilate the content concepts from outside their world view when encountered online?

Institutional Repositorities:

A Institutional Repository is those database resources held by places like Universities, Colleges, and Research Facilities or Information warehouses. The content of such Repositories can run the spectrum from simple cooking recipes to the chemical formula for a new flu vaccine.
Couple this content with the ability to network on a global scale and the true potential of digital Repositories becomes apparent.