Week 11 Reading Notes

A Viewpoint Analysis of the Digital Library

Arms lists three viewpoints with which to investigate this question: "Should digital libraries be self-sufficient islands or should we strive for a single global digital library?" The viewpoints are: organizational (such as the Library of Congress), technical, and user's.

The first viewpoint emphasizes the individual library as the source of all knowledge. It does not focus on collaboration or interoperability with other libraries and their interfaces. This viewpoint is often ineffective for users.

The second viewpoint concerns the technical systems of digital libraries. Interoperability between structures and metadata is key, but users are not. This viewpoint has offered many successes, such as XML, Z39.50 and MARC. Unfortunately, these advances are not used to their potential.

The third viewpoint, from the user, is indifferent to technological and organizational viewpoints. Interfaces are not adequately uniform from institution to institution. Organizations such as the Library of Congress may not even be in the user's subconscious.

Arms advocates more study of the user's viewpoint. He suggests holistic evaluations in which the user accesses multiple libraries.

Social Aspects of Digital Libraries

This paper, the result of a workshop between UCLA and the National Science Foundation, asserts that digital library creators should be more concerned with their social context. The article states an obvious but often ignored goal: "digital libraries should be constructed in a way that accommodates the actual tasks and activities that people engage in when they create, seek, and use information resources."

Users, if unimpressed by institutional digital libraries, "will construct digital libraries on their own behalf." Thus, digital library creators should follow one of the basic tenets of Website portal design: allow the interface and contents to be organized according to individual user preferences.

The Information Life Cycle has three stages: creation (when the digital object is active - being creating, modified, and indexed), searching (when the digital object is semi-active - being stored and distributed), and utilization (when the digital object is inactive - being discarded or mined).

Some of the issues that stand out to me are:

• how to facilitate information sharing across multiple user communities
• how to describe and organize content in flux (such as Web sites)
• when to use human versus automated indexing, despite human indexing's cost and time
• whether to create a single interface for a library, or different interfaces that are more useful for different groups (such as a simpler interface for children and a highly manipulable, complex interface for academicians)

The conclusion of this report is similar to Arms' conclusion, that user interaction with digital libraries needs to be studied further, especially among different cultural groups.

The Infinite Library

This article evaluates Google Book Search rather objectively.

Some concerns include:

• entrusting global literary heritage to a corporation
• libraries devoid of physical content; libraries as lonely shells for preservationists
• libraries' inability to share their digital copies of scanned books with anyone but Google
• handwritten texts that are unsearchable via OCR
• digitizing books in the less stringent Internet Archive instead of Book Search
  

Some benefits include:

• increased need for librarians to help guide patrons through the morass of online text
• global access for books previously available only in noncirculating or restricted libraries

My personal concern is the sunny belief that Google is a "good citizen" as librarian John Wilkin notes. Google is relatively good now, but that guarantees nothing for the future. Like civilizations, companies rise and fall, go bankrupt, get bought out by conglomerates, and so on. Google's collaboration with the Chinese government to censor public Internet access does not qualify as good citizenship.