This week's readings were interesting, because they went against some of the stereotypical thoughts about librarians. They showed that librarians acknowledge the need for change, and that they were and are willing to adapt to the new online informational world.
The first two articles describe how librarians came to understand the future of online information. These were two really great articles about the history of libraries moving into the digital age. I had no idea that there was a great national push by librarians and computer scientists alike to move information into digital formats. I always assumed, that like many of the ideas and reforms that libraries come up with, they were just following the trends of the times, and working hard to keep up. The second article, "Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative" did have a really great quote though, about the conflicting nature of computer science people and librarians:
Some librarians had expected DLI money to flow into collection building. Instead, they perceive, computer
scientists have hijacked the money and created an environment whose connection to librarianship is unclear. Some felt that their fast moving computing enthusiast partners too thoughtlessly dismissed important functions, like collection development, as quaint.
The impatient among computer scientists in turn could not understand why librarians are so annoyingly deliberate about metadata, spending years arguing about structures that the computer scientists felt would be replaceable by just another clever search algorithm improvement. Most of all, some computer scientists couldn't understand why librarians couldn't be, well, normal computer scientists.
This quote shows why much work is still needed to be done before libraries and technology can truly live together peacefully. Librarians want money for collection development, computer scientists want librarians to understand the importance of digital collections.
The third article was promising in the sense that it was written for the Association of Research Libraries, and acknowledged the need for digitized information. The author stresses the need for both librarian and computer scientist input into library resources. The author also mentions that Universities as a whole must support these kinds of programs, otherwise they will be a waste of time, money, and information.
Marc, I agree with you that this week reading are contrast to the previous technical readings and issues described in these articles are important for library. Digital library is interesting project and complex project where collaboration between librarians and computer scientists is a part of the success. The mis-understanding between the library and computer sciences is due to their differences in their theoretical and practical bases. Existing problems in communication and collaboration between the librarians and computer scientists were described in article “Imaging Pittsburgh…” written by Galloway (previously assigned reading), where the perception and aim of digital collections described these differences through the approach to the digital collection. I think librarians should strive to understand the computer scientists and vice versa; in difficult situations both of them should reach agreement through the arbitration.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the note! These readings are the reason I'm so glad I took this class. It is interesting to see the differences between computer science people and librarians, and also to see how their worlds intersect. The need for compromise and understanding is great.
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