Wednesday, November 12, 2008

week 11 readings

Arms:
viewpoint analysis, a technique from software development. The idea is to identify the various stakeholders in a system and view the system from each of their viewpoints.

Before computer networks, an emphasis on the organizational viewpoint was natural. When libraries were defined by their buildings, an individual patron used a very small number of libraries, perhaps the local public library or a university library.

Interoperability research assumes that there are many digital libraries: the challenge is how to encourage collaboration among independent digital libraries with differing missions and resources

From the user's viewpoint, technology is irrelevant and organizations are of secondary importance. Separate organizations, each with their own identity, can easily become an obstacle.

For the past decade, many people have carried out research and development on separate digital libraries and technical interoperability among them. As the early work matures, it would be easy for digital libraries research to become inbred, focusing on detailed refinement of the same agenda. Alternatively, we can think of the digital library from the user's viewpoint

About twenty years ago, independent computer networks began to merge into the single unified Internet that we take for granted today. Perhaps now is the time for digital libraries to strive for the same transition, to a single Digital Library

Roush:
The digitization of the world's enormous store of library books--an effort dating to the early 1990s in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere--has been a slow, expensive, and underfunded process.

Google's efforts and others like it will force libraries and librarians to reëxamine their core principles -- including their commitment to spreading knowledge freely

some librarians are very concerned about the terms of access and are very concerned that a commercial entity will have control over materials that libraries have collected

libraries, which allow many readers to use the same book, have always enjoyed something of an exemption from copyright law. Now the mass digitization of library books threatens to make their content just as portable -- or piracy prone, depending on one's point of view -- as digital music.

libraries in the United States are gaining users, despite the advent of the Web, and that libraries are being constructed or renovated at an unprecedented rate (architect Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library, for example, is the new jewel of that city's downtown)

Digitization itself, of course, is no small challenge. Scanning the pages of brittle old books at high speed without damaging them is a problem that's still being addressed, as is the question of how to store and preserve their content once it's in digital form. The Google initiative has also amplified a long-standing debate among librarians, authors, publishers, and technologists over how to guarantee the fullest possible access to digitized books, including those still under copyright

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology cannot yet interpret handwritten script, so exposing the content of these books to today's search engines requires typing their texts into separate files linked to the original images

digitization machines: a fleet of proprietary robotic cameras, still under development, that will turn the digitization of printed books into a true assembly-line process and, in theory, lower the cost to about $10 per book, compared to a minimum of $30 per book today.

Google will give each participating library a copy of the books it has digitized while keeping another for itself. Initially, Google will use its copy to augment its existing Google Print program, which mixes relevant snippets from recently published books into the usual results returned by its Web search tool.

may do whatever it likes with the digital scans of its own holdings -- as long as it doesn't share them with companies that could use them to compete with Google. Such limitations may prove uncomfortable, but most librarians say they can live with them.

free and open access is exactly what public libraries, as storehouses of printed books and periodicals, have traditionally provided. But the very fact that digital files are so much easier to share than physical books (which scares publishers just as MP3 file sharing scares record companies) could lead to limits on redistribution that prevent libraries from giving patrons as much access to their digital collections as they would like.

idea that there are some things you can exploit for commercial purposes for a certain amount of time, and then you play the open game

American Library Association is one of the loudest advocates of proposed legislation to reinforce the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright law, which entitle the public to republish portions of copyrighted works for purposes of commentary or criticism

Mass digitization may eventually force a redefinition of fair use, some librari­ans believe. The more public-domain literature that appears on the Web through Google Print, the greater the likelihood that citi­zens will demand an equitable but low-cost way to view the much larger mass of copyrighted books.

Social Aspects of Digital Libraries:
digital libraries represent a set of significant social problems that require human and technological resources to solve.

Digital libraries are a set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching, and using information. In this sense they are an extension and enhancement of information storage and retrieval systems that manipulate digital data in any medium (text, images, sounds; static or dynamic images) and exist in distributed networks.

Digital libraries are constructed -- collected and organized -- by a community of users, and their functional capabilities support the information needs and uses of that community. They are a component of communities in which individuals and groups interact with each other, using data, information, and knowledge resources and systems.

While it is possible to build systems independent of human activities that will satisfy technical specifications, systems that work for people must be based on analyses of learning and other life activities. Empirical research on users should be influencing design in three ways: (1) by discovering which functionalities user communities regard as priorities; (2) by developing basic analytical categories that influence the design of system architecture; and (3) by generating integrated design processes that include empirical research and user community participation throughout the design cycle.

three themes:
  • Human-centered research issues: a focus on people, both as individual users and as members of groups and communities, communicators, creators, users, learners, or managers of information. We are concerned with groups and communities as units of analysis as well as with individual users.
  • Artifact-centered research issues: a focus on creating, organizing, representing, storing, and retrieving the artifacts of human communication.
  • Systems-centered research issues: a focus on digital libraries as systems that enable interaction with these artifacts and that support related communication processes.
Individual users of information technology are studied in communication, library and information science, education, psychology, human factors, and linguistics, among others. Most of the research in these disciplines views the individual as an actor who employs the technology for instrumental purposes.

Among the better understood topics at this level are the relationship between work practices and the design of systems and user interfaces; evolution, implementation, and evaluation of information technologies, especially in organizations; and user perceptions of and participation in development. A substantial body of work extending over several decades has demonstrated enduring inequities in the distribution of and access to information and related technologies across social groups.

Heterogeneous populations and applications:
Institutions/cultural objects of study
Information literacy skills:
Designing for richness:
Studies of situated use:
Design world/Content world interface:
Tools for content creators:

Making artifacts useful within a community:
Making artifacts useful to multiple communities:
Dynamic artifacts:
Hybrid digital libraries:
Professional practices and principles:
Human vs. automated indexing:
Legacy data
Hierarchies of description
Portability:
Artifactual relationships
Level of representation

Community-based development tools
Multiple interfaces
Social interfaces:
Mediating interaction:
Intelligent agents, user models:
Information presentation
Open architecture:
Development methods:
Tools for accessing and filtering information:

Participatory design:
Studying new activities
Levels of evaluation:
Iterative methods
Tailoring methods:

recommending that research be conducted on these themes, that scholars from multiple disciplines be encouraged to develop joint projects, that scholars and practitioners work together, and that digital libraries be developed and evaluated in operational, as well as experimental, work environments.

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