Borgman, Christine: From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure

This reading seemed a bit repetitive and long-winded to me, although I suppose it was good to get a more in-depth perspective on the conflicts of interest in digital library research and implementation. The point that stood out to me as most important was the fact that databases and other forms of stored digital information my comprise the bulk of a DL, but these collections will not be usable and worthwhile unless they are accessible to a community of users, and the information contained within these collections must be of value to the user community.

In particular I liked this sentence from p. 46: "Libraries collect content on the basis of the information needs of their user communities; the medium in which the content is captured is a secondary concern."

I did agree with the use of Borgman's woking definition on p.48 as a way to encompass both sides of the research/practice divide, as well as the statement on p.50 that "digital libraries are themselves becoming 'enabling technologies' for other applications." However, I was a bit confused about the emphasis on a definition for a "global digital library." Is this concept meant in the same sense as H.G. Wells' goal of attaining a single encyclopedia that contains all the world's knowledge? If not, I guess I just don't understand the importance of defining this beyond the loose concept of individual digital libraries that are accessible via a single medium, in this case the internet.

One concern that I did have was the aging of the information in this article...as it was written in 2000, I am curious to see how much of the information is still valid and up-to-date in 2008. For example, p. 50 states that "Digital libraries research now falls under the human-centered systems program of CIC" and I would like to know if this is still the case or if it has changed in the past 8 years. The final paragraph on this same page laments the challenges of DL's as an interdisciplinary problem and that some reasearches have yet to hear the term "digital libraries." Surely this is not still the case in 2008, or at least not to nearly the same degree?