LESK, ch. 1

Right from the start, I found this reading a bit more practical and informative than Borgman.

I found the extended definition on pp. 2-3 quite helpful, with the following four main points:
1. DL must have content
2. Content needs to be stored and retrieved.
3. Content must be made accessible.
4. Content must be delivered to user.
Followed by the introduction of the new costs and legal issues surrounding digital collections.

Section 1.2 seemed quite straightforward to me with some good points, especially that "For more than a decade, nearly every word printed and typed has been prepared on a computer. Paradoxically, until very recently most reading has been from paper." The focus on the interplay between technology, economics, and user-driven information usage felt like a good overview of the challenges facing digital libraries, and digital information sources generally.

I particularly enjoyed the in-depth (albeit lengthy) discussion in section 1.4 of changing prices and capacities for different info storage and retrieval technologies. The level of detail really drove home the challenges of storing and maintaining such vast quantities of information, even as our resources improve.

It feels like I have been hearing about Vannevar Bush in every single class I've had this week, so section 1.3 of the chapter was interesting more in the contrast depicted between Bush and Warren Weaver. Reading about the different emphases of their research reminded me of events in the history of Psychology, specifically the emphasis throughout much of the early twentieth century on behaviorist theories until the so-called "cognitive revolution" in the 60s. And in fact, the chapter later alluded to that same revolution on p.24 (section 1.5), with references to scientists such as Chomsky and Oettinger.

I have a BA in Lingustics (full disclosure, ha), so section 1.5 was highly interesting to me. However, I did feel that it understated the real challenges and shortcomings of attempts to capture the intricacies of natural human language with computers and other machines, perhaps for necessary reasons of length.

The background info on the history of the internet and the programs/interfaces that are commonly used today was quite informative and clear, in particular the discussion of Google's groundbreaking method of ranking search results to provide better information, and not just a lot of it. On a side note, I was talking to my mother on the phone last night and she told me that for the first time ever she successfully used google to find information that she was looking for (a substitution for self-rising flour in a recipe). That this is the first time she has managed to do so only now, after nearly six years of regular computer usage (yes, she was a late adopter) really drove this point home to me, of the very really challenges involved in making digital information an effective tool for retreiving high-quality information.

As stated in section 1.7, I felt that the two most important questions lingering over the development of DL's are:
1. What do people want to do with available technologies?
2. What content should be provided? And specifically, which content can be provided entirely digitally, and which types will never be as effective/adequate in a digital form?