Digital Libraries
First off, I agree that Google Scholar is the competition of institutional repositories. Using Google anything is easier than searching university's databases. You can type searches using natural language and normally get relevant information back. Thank you Google, keep up the good work! Maybe if we could capture a Google employee and hold him/her hostage, they can give us some ideas about improving searching for more effective results.
(Disclaimer: I do not condone kidnapping.)
Dewey Meets Turing
This article was clearly written by a librarian; it used such gems as strutting computer scientists and naive computing partners. However, the article was an interesting look at the two sides of the Digital Libraries Initiative. I especially enjoyed the section concerning the conceptions and misconceptions. I agree that opportunites are arising for librarians and authors to connect.
Association of Research Libraries
This was a very interesting article; and probably could have useful to people in LIS2000 writing the first paper. I really enjoyed the finals thoughts in the article discussing the author's views on potential areas of counterproductivity. One possible problem is people wishing to change scholarly communication and trying to use IRs to this; since they may place constraints on the IR's services. This may take away from insitutional repositories primary point.
I agree: it would have been a helpful angle for the first paper. Said paper being the most nebulous of my shady career.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't much of a comment, and for that I apologize; you probably deserve better....
I enjoyed your idea to capture a Google employee! Google is much easier to search than databases, but maybe the database search models will eventually be improved. I think the developers of these databases are aware of the general frustrations of users and will figure out a way to make them more effective.
ReplyDeleteI also like the idea of kidnapping a Google employee and redoing library databases. Google is much easier to use than most databases, which makes me wish that they were more user-friendly like Google search. On the flip side, maybe library databases not being as user friendly as Google make it "scholarly." If this is the case then they need to take a look at who their users are and what their users are using frequently. Are they using the databases or Google more frequently?
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