William H. Mischo - Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
It's been my experience that the argument of federated searching (which is advocated in this article) as the 'way of the future' is not really living up the its much-hyped potential. While the idea of federated searching is certainly glamorous and plays well into recent generations' expectations of consolidated information retrieval from the fewest sources possible, it seems that vendors and libraries have struggled to effectively implement federated searching with the level of granularity necessary for serious researchers seeking very specified pieces of information. Case in point (not to offend any Pitt librarians), try writing a literature review by using articles retrieved using Pitt's federated journal search page - the level of detail and control necessary for specific data retrieval just isn't available. A side note: it is impressive to see how colleges and universities have pushed the envelope of digital collections technology and prompted many important innovations in information delivery and retrieval.
Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley - Dewey Meets Turing
The authors make interesting points here - I think that while they conceive of a much more polarized split between librarians and computer scientists (and there may be some truth to it), the reality of these two professions today is such that the specialized aspects of both are starting to branch back toward each other. The lines of distinction between the two are becoming increasingly blurred as the common issues each face become more relevant to the other. If anything, the symbiosis the authors seem to recognize between the disciplines in the area of digital collections are more relevant today than perhaps they even were at the time this article was written. Neither side can easily disregard the standards and methods of the other.
Clifford Lynch - ARL: Institutional Repositories
Very well argued and goes back to one of the points Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley make about the legitimacy of digital scholarly communication in an atmosphere that is not conducive to rewarding/recognizing non-traditional dissemination of scholarly material. I would have some concern about those faculty members who may find the idea of an institutional repository attractive for the purposes of preservation, but who feel the need (for career advancement purposes or otherwise) to participate in the 'traditional' scholarly communication channels. Is there enough incentive in institutional repositories to justify some faculty making their scholarly work openly available when there is some potential that they can still use it to leverage professional advancement from it?
You bring up a very good point about trying to consolidate all scholarly research especially with your example of the literature review. No matter how good the system is, there will always be more information out there to find. Having everything go digital may make it easier to find scholarly sources but it also makes it more difficult to find everything, especially when there are more outlets for scholarly sources.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that, despite the differences between librarians and computer scientists, they do share some common goals when tackling the digital universe.
I also agree about the shortcomings of the federated search tools, although I've not used the tool available through Pitt's ULS; I think that the Google-like experience isn't necessarily appropriate or even helpful for researchers, particularly novice researchers. Undergraduate students who are just becoming accustomed to the complexities of the research process aren't benefited by tools that oversimplify the research process.
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