Reading Note: Dewey Meets Turing

The Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley article was certainly an eye opener on understanding the history of digital libraries and how the relationship developed between librarians and the IT contingency of the computer science field.
I remember in the early '90's when the Internet was just a foggy notion to the average student on a university campus. I being one of those "foggy" students. Using ERIC to find articles for a course was something I had to go to the library to use, not some database that I could have access to at home to peruse on my own time. My first class that featured the use of a computer was an Intro. astronomy course. The professored offered the course as one of the first "paperless" classrooms" in that our assignments were sent to him vie e-mail, which at the time was a DOS-based software program that had little or no visual prompting or interface.
It's interesting to put the notion of the digital library in a context that was precursory to this dawn of an effective Internet phenomenon. That it was this phenomenon that hindered the steady advancement of a solidified digital library practice and methodology is also intriguing. Having never delved into digital library history it was my incorrect assumption that the web and the internet were obvious precursors to any notion of a digital library.
I have a lot to gather and learn from this course. I am interested in the current IT trend in the library environment and am also curious about where the current culture has progressed. The Paepcke article brings some generalities of this history to light. The interplay between the sphere of computer scientists and libararians is rather amusing seeing as how they want the same conclusions but go by seperate paths to get there. As the Paepcke article states," if only . . . librarians would stop making computer scientists choose content descriptors from a controlled vocabulary of terms...",and, "In return, Web servers of flighty computer scientists get to return their irresponsible "404 Not Found," which makes any librarians worth their salt grit their teeth."

Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina, Rebecca Garcia-Molina Garcia-Molina Wesley, “Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative” D-Lib Magazine, Volume 11 Number 7/8, July/August 2005

Hey!! The first posting of my new blog! Mmmmmm, digital libraries.

Hello, fellow classmates and Professor He, not to mention the rest of my international internet cohorts lucky enough to ramble over this blog. I look forward to the readings and a little give and take discussion on all things digital library in our near future.