Mischo writes, "The goal of seamless federation across distributed, heterogeneous resources remains the holy grail of digital library work." How could we even achieve this? Not all authors are going to agree to this equal distribution. They want money, right? Not. Gonna. Happen. Also, this point really intrigued me, as it's definitely something I've noticed working reference at Hillman: "It is interesting that Google Scholar is being held up as the competition for both campus institutional repository systems (at least in terms of search and discovery) and academic library federated searching." This is tangential to the Digital Library issue, but I think catalogers will have to totally revamp catalogs to better reflect and serve the kind of searching that both students and the public will likely be doing as a result of using & loving Google.
The "Dewey Meets Turing" article brings up some really good points. The authors wrote, "The disruption to the library community was greatly exacerbated by many journal publishers' business decision to charge at a premium for digital content. This decision has been forcing academic libraries to cancel subscriptions, undermining their role as conduits to scholarly work," a point which so greatly frustrates me. Journal flipping, at the rate which we're going, makes me immeasurably nervous, and similarly, I think it does a great disservice to public patrons who will be unable to access things they otherwise could have accessed.
Maybe I don't yet trust digitization and digital libraries enough. Who knows.
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4 comments:
I completely agree with you that changes will have to be made to the way in which library search engines work, because personally I believe Google Scholar to be a much faster and efficient way to find sources (especially online ones) than PittCat.
Elaina,
I definitely agree with you that the "holy grail" just isn't going to happen. It's pretty much nothing more than wishful thinking in my opinion.
I agree with you concerning the compatibility of google scholar and I believe the libraries need to do something to keep up. I also think it is a shame that journal services are charging. I believe that there has to be a way out somehow....
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