Week 11 - Reading Response

First-This is late, but I totally blanked on posting it Friday. I wrote it, saved it, and promptly forgot about the most important part....

So...Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work:

I think that this article was a little too outdated. It might be useful in writing a history of internet searches and repository development, but I am not entirely sure of what I was supposed to gain from reading it. In computer/internet terms, three years is a really long time. Stuff that might have been new or unknown then is now common knowledge or even passe.

Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative
I hope you will pardon me if I express frustration at what I see as utter stupidity and stubborness on the part of both the librarians and the computer scientists. One of the things I have noticed among highly educated people is their tendency to believe that their knowledge in one particular field makes them knowledgeable in others. Librarians have it worse than others because they can gain a staggering amount of knowledge in a wide variety of fields, simply during the course of performing their job over the years. That being said, I am getting really tired of reading about how Computer Scientists think this, Librarians think this, Scientists think this, and Historians think this, etc. It is staggeringly clear to me that when I want to do something, I must seek out the best people for doing it--get the carpenter to fix the walls, the plumber to do the pipes, and the electrician to do the wiring. If the carpenter does the wiring, maybe he actually knows a little, but it will obviously not be done to its best, and may in fact be dangerous. I don't understand why a piece of paper makes so many people think that they can do everything and know better than everyone else, and why there are so many articles presenting the idea of collaboration and appropriate division of labor as new.

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
Okay, to completely contradict that part I wrote about how an article from 2005 might be outdated already....I think this article is outstanding and have zoteroed it for future reference. Perhaps what makes it still relevant is the lack of actual technical/technology requirements/pieces/descriptions and the fact that it is much more a general concept article...I don't know... I do believe that the guidelines listed for starting institutional repositories, as well as the three concerns the author has about institutions creating repositories, are not only important and relevant, but translatable to all things--databases, collections, webpages, web-initiatives, etc. I wonder how many inst. reps. actually failed and succeeded in the last 5 years and how many of those failures and successes can be attributed to the institution either taking said guidelines and concerns into account or ignoring them.
That being said, however, I would imagine that institutions following those guidelines may be a pipe dream more often than not: consider, "In a budget crunch, the institutional repository may be one of the last things that can be cut, given the way that digital preservation demands steady and consistent attention and hence funding. Faculty who choose to rely on institutional repositories to disseminate and preserve their work are placing a great deal of trust in their institution and in the integrity, wisdom, and competence of the people who manage it. We need to ensure that our institutional repositories are worthy of this trust." Given my experience with both institutions and budget crunches, there is no doubt in my mind that most institutions will try to do it with half the necessary people and a quarter of the necessary funding (which will be one of the first things slashed in a real budget crisis). In other words, for the majority of people, the institution does not even slightly deserve any amount of trust, unless you are trusting it to mess things up.