Week 1 Readings

Dewey Meets Turing

I thought this article, which describes the Digital Libraries Initiative, was interesting because it highlighted the differences between computer scientists and librarians/information science professionals. It's evident that contrary to the Borgman chapter that we read, the rise of the Web as an information medium influenced the thinking of this article, particularly in the section titled The Cuckoo Egg's Surprise.

Borgman, Chapter 2

This was, to me, the most interesting of the articles that we had to read for Week 1. Partially this is, as others have pointed out, because it was written a decade ago and of course, much has changed in the development of digital libraries since that time, some things in unimaginable ways. I'd like to see an article that revisited this one and commented on these changes.

Nevertheless, one of the main points in this article endures today. On page 48, she contrasts the evolutionary and revolutionary views of digital libraries and this is what I found really interesting. Even in this day and age of e-readers and virtually unlimited (and often times free) online content being the source of many users' information, the optimist in me would like to see the "evolutionary" model of digital libraries supplementing and not supplanting (as the "revolutionary" model would suggest) physical libraries.

Setting the Foundations of Digital Libraries
To be quite honest, I found this article the least engaging out of all the articles we had to read for Week 1. The talk of architecture, hierachies, structure and even manifestos just didn't really compute for me.

Digital Libraries
This article nicely contrasts the average end user's expectations and experiences with searching with the expectations of the average librarian or information professional. I also found all of the information about XML interesting as well. Though it's from only one year later, it also didn't seem to be as dated as the Borgman chapter that we read.