Friday, November 7, 2008

READING WEEK #10

Digital Libraries
The author states that the Federal government has supported digital library research in a series of community-based planning workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has funded six projects under the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI-1 and DL-2) programs. These programs comprised of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), and the D-Lib Test Suite program. Between 1994 and 1999, $68 million in federal research grants were awarded to these two programs.
The University of Michigan, Stanford University, The University of California-Berkeley, The University of California-Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon University and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were each awarded grants to pursue research in digitalization. This article was very interesting and informative to me as it made me aware of the various funding the Federal Government give to digital research and the funding awarded to universities.


Dewey Meets Turing
This article gives the history and outcome of the National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) in which computer scientist, librarians, and publishers came together to make up digital libraries. The main 2 parties were the computer scientists and the librarians. The computer scientists imagined how current library functions would be moved forward by an injection of computing insight and librarians saw obvious opportunities lay in novel search capabilities, holdings management, and instant access for the librarians. This seemed simple and fine until the interruption World Wide Internet. The internet shattered both parties outlooks by it integration and sharing of information. In time computer scientists and librarians learned the advantages of reaching more people in an open form via the net. Now they see their struggle as finding ways to contain the net/

2 comments:

liz's blog said...

Joyce, I also found the article interesting. Especially in the age of funding cuts, I am glad the federal government is giving money to universities fordigital research.

Kristina Grube Lacroix said...

Your notes are very detailed, and helpful. They provide a nice summary of the article. I also thought it was an interesting article, and enjoyed learning about digital libraries and how they are growing.