Week of 11/9 lectures and reading

I really enjoyed this week's lecture and some of the readings as well. In fact, it may have been my favorite lecture so far in the entire course. I'm very interested in the process of digitization and preservation and the issues surrounding it. Like many, I found it ironic that Google doesn't even preserve its history going back to 1998 and furthermore, I have to agree that digitization is just a way to backup originals and shouldn't be used as a substitute for them. This point was further evidenced by the amount examples cited like the Alexandria Library in which innumerable resources were lost forever. As always, it's best to have multiple copies of documents for the sake of preservation. In any case, it reminded me of some of the things covered in the Intro to Archives class I took last spring, so it's nice to see tie-ins with other courses and subjects, too.

Week 4 readings and some comments on Week 3

I didn't post on here last week due to there being no readings for that week while we worked on setting up and testing out Greenstone and DSpace. Thus, I wasn't sure if we were still supposed to post on here or not. Though I initially had troubling setting up Greenstone, I was finally able to get it to work and find it relatively easy to use. I think that for the project, my group will end up using it instead of DSpace due to what was said in this past week's lecture.

Now onto this week's readings. I thought that there was a little bit of a disconnect between this week's lecture and the readings. For example, identifiers were only mentioned at the end of the lecture, while most of it was taken up by talking about digitization issues in general. There was, however, a lot of talk about DOI, so perhaps I'm wrong about this.