Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries
Initiative
As technology advanced, libraries needed to find a way to
stay integrated with an ever-increasing digital society. I personally think
it's impressive that libraries had the foresight to begin the Digital Libraries
Initiative before even the World Wide Web became a household name. This
initiative combined the professional skills of librarians, computer scientists,
and publishers to accomplish the task of making information readily available
in a digital format. While a brilliantly innovative concept, the path of the
DLI did encounter some complications. Most notably, each profession had
different expectations for the project. The librarians placed great emphasis on
collection development and making sure metadata was accurate; computer
scientist professions found the librarians' dedication to these points
humorous, they didn't understand why they couldn't just write an algorithm to
retrieve the information. Publishers also had differing motives than librarians
because while librarians advocated open access type distribution of
information, publishers still wanted and needed to make a profit on the
information industry. Regardless of the pressure they were under to conform to
changing societal norms and expectations, I think it's really honorable that
librarians held onto their professional values.
Institutional Repositories
The institutional repository is a reaction from the
scholarship community to the increasing nature of digital content. Scholars and
universities recognized that many of their contributions to information will be
represented, documented, and shared in digital form at a progressive rate going
forward. The main goal is both to preserve digital scholarship, and to make it
available. Not unlike the open access model that publicly funded research
should be available to the public, Institutional repositories seek to recognize
their responsibility to members of their communities and the public by making
this information available. Institutional repositories create an environment where
new works of scholarship can be managed and disseminated, as well as provide
opportunities for new ways to publish scholarly materials. Faculty can also
take advantage of institutional repositories by using them to distribute
extensive teaching and learning materials to their students. The author
cautions that institutional repositories will only remain effective as long as
the goal remains to advance the interests of campus communities and of
scholarship, not to be used as a means of asserting control or ownership over
the information. I thought it was interesting to note that this article was
written over 10 years ago, but many of the author’s points and insights could
still be applicable today.
Web Search Engines
When you type a search into a search engine, like Google for
example, almost automatically you receive page upon page of results. It is almost
a reactive process: type, enter, results! I doubt many people realize just how
much is actually going on behind the scenes of your search in just those few
milliseconds. I know for a fact that I didn’t. Not only are search engines
crawling the web for websites relevant to the keyword you entered, they are
making sure that duplicate sites are deleted, making sure the site is available
to the public by its creator, and preventing spam websites that target result
lists; and it does all of this basically in the blink of an eye. When running a
query on a search engine the algorithm used takes into account many ranking
factors to get the results desired. This way you can type your search terms
without using any type of operator. The search engine attempts to infer what
you’re looking for in your search, so if you type in “hot dog” it is going to
give you information on the food not on an animal that is hot. I think that
libraries would could benefit from modeling their database search criteria
after search engine algorithms. Increasingly, people circumvent searching for
information from the library because the search processes can be confusing and
frustrating. As an alternative more and more people turn to sites like Google
for their search, regardless of how reliable or not the information is.
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