Reading Notes 8

Reading Notes for 11/15

Digital Libraries
The number and variety of entities with administration over some portion of the scholarly information landscape immediately illustrates why navigation of this landscape is so complicated. I cringe to imagine the ad hoc standards some of those groups have come up with in a pinch. Aggregate, collocate, and federate. I didn't even know what collocate meant (: to set or arrange in a place or position; especially : to set side by side). It's interesting that while the Internet is a completely global infrastructure now, so much of it's innovations still come from the US.

Dewey meets Turing
"[Information] technologies were indeed important to ensure libraries' continued impact on scholarly work." That's an understatement. Again we have the publishers cast as villains inhibiting distributed innovations. We poor librarians have such difficulty letting go of our commitment to well-ordered and defined collections, which it seems the rest of the world (computer scientists included) doesn't really give a crap about as long as they can find whatever they individually need.

Institutional Repositories
The Pitt IR (d-scholarship.pitt.edu) is a DSpace IR, right? As the proportion of scholarship that exists in a born-digital format increases, it seems almost irresponsible for a university to not have an IR. More evidence of how faculty is outpacing institutions at embracing the opportunities technological innovation provides for the construction and dissemination of their scholarship. Build IRs and change your promotion and tenure processes already, will ya?