Week 13 Reading Notes

Lynch: Where Do We Go from Here?

Lynch reminds readers that digital libraries didn't suddenly appear in the 90s alongside the Web, but instead trace their advent to the 60s. Digital library research began receiving major governmental funding in the mid-90s, which "legitimized digital libraries as a field of research." Lynch is very appreciative of the NSF funding that encouraged collaboration and community building, especially among a diverse group of sectors.

The bulk of programmatic government funding for digital libraries has tapered, except for research involving defense, intelligence and homeland security. Money is being directed at digital asset management, institutional repositories, and creating new collections.

In the future, the largest issues for digital libraries will be preservation and ethical stewardship. Lynch would like to see more studies on privacy/personal information management, user-behaviors, interactive library environments, and libraries' role in learning and human development.

Lynch writes, "The lion's share of the NSF funding went to computer science groups, with libraries often being only peripherally involved, if at all." I wonder if digital libraries would be more user-friendly today if librarians had gotten a bigger slice of the government pie back then.

Stiglitz: Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs

This Nobel laureate wants to empower the developing world through less stringent intellectual property rights and more open access/open source content. He criticizes biased intellectual property rights that benefit developed nations and their monopolistic corporations. These rights, he says, can hinder innovation, which relies on liberal dissemination of ideas.

Stiglitz writes, "Monopolists may have much less incentive to innovate than they would if they had to compete." He uses Microsoft's squelching of the Netscape browser as an example. I agree that Microsoft needs more competition, especially since Vista is far from innovative. However, despite Microsoft's dominance, innovation has not died: Firefox is free, open source, and flourishing.

Knowledge Lost in Information

This report asks the NSF to continue funding digital libraries at a price of $60 million a year. Lapsed funding could cause international competitors to overtake the U.S. in research accomplishments. It could also lead to more chaos in libraries as users lose control over the world's growing masses of information.

Some of the research needs include:

• transferring research models to broader contexts, thus increasing user populations
• better strategies for accessing information in various formats
• cognitive completion, or prompts that help a user pinpoint her desired subject
• proactive storage systems that automatically cull new information
• user-centered design, customizable user interfaces
• automatic production of metadata
• creating a universal architecture
• active replication to ensure preservation
• interoperability

Some reasons for NSF to fund digital libraries:

• national security will be stronger
• students will be better equipped to compete in a global economy
• will motivate research in health and environmental sciences

I enjoyed this quote from Herbert Simon: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." The authors of this report maintain that digital library research should provide ways to manage the information glut. One way is to "reduce available information to actionable information." This is a tricky task: who decides what is actionable and what should be tossed? For instance, 20 years from now, hurricane warning information for Katrina will not be actionable, but it will still have historical relevance.