Week 11 Social Issues

Social Aspects of Digital Libraries. The final report of UCLA-NSF Social Aspects of Digital Libraries Workshop. http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/research/dig_libraries/index.html.

 

Goals: to assess existing data that might inform research and to propose a research agenda that would pose new questions.

 

A definition of digital libraries: emphasizing that they extend and enhance existing information storage and retrieval systems, incorporating digital data and metadata in any form; the other emphasizing that design, policy, and practice should reflect the social context in which they exist.

 

Proposal of an information life cycle model to illustrate the flow of human activities in creating, searching, and using information and the stages through which information artifacts may pass: activity, inactivity, and disposal.

 

Research issues:

• Human-centered: 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: a focus on creating, organizing, representing, storing, and retrieving the artifacts of human communication.
• Systems-centered: a focus on digital libraries as systems that enable interaction with these artifacts and that support related communication processes.

• Multiple disciplinary joint projects.
• Digital libraries be developed and evaluated in operational, as well as experimental, work environments.
• The project found a multitude of other research issues: hybrid D-libs, dynamic index and artifact issues, etc.

 

D-libraries represent a set of significant social problems that require human and technological solutions.

 

Attempting to define D-libraries led to 2 separate definitions though complementary:

1. "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. The content of digital libraries includes data, metadata that describe various aspects of the data (e.g., representation, creator, owner, reproduction rights), and metadata that consist of links or relationships to other data or metadata, whether internal or external to the digital library.
2. 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. In this sense they are an extension, enhancement, and integration of a variety of information institutions as physical places where resources are selected, collected, organized, preserved, and accessed in support of a user community. These information institutions include, among others, libraries, museums, archives, and schools, but digital libraries also extend and serve other community settings, including classrooms, offices, laboratories, homes, and public spaces."

 

The workshop concluded with the development of a life cycle information model: a cyclical model with hierarchical levels of activity, handling, and process.  The concluded that the individual research problems noted needed to be addressed individually, including exploring the definition for digital libraries used in the workshop project, as it was still thought to be vague in its usage of certain terms, i.e., information, community, library.

 

The Infinite Library, Wade Roush, Technology Review, 2005. (available in CourseWeb)

Could not find text in courseweb.

 

William Y. Arms, “A Viewpoint Analysis of the Digital Library”, D-Lib Magazine, Volume 11 Number 7/8, July/August 2005. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/arms/07arms.html

 

The first federal research program: DARPA's Computer Science Technical Reports Project. Heated discussions during this research about whether the field of study should be called digital libraries or the digital library. "Should digital libraries be encouraged to develop independently or together? "

 

This article looks at D-libraries from three viewpoints: organizational, technical, and the user. Organizationally, the world consists of separate digital libraries, but for the user, this characteristic is obscured.

• Is this important? D-libraries research has neglected recognizing major innovations. Computer scientists resist the simple technology of the Web. Librarians disparaged the value of Web search engines. Greater emphasis must be made toward user viewpoint, and less on the technical and organizational.

 

Besides testing libraries on users, users should be more involved in development not just in criticism.  Rather than just suggesting user groups should perhaps be able to see the incremental suggestions and judge usability before and after.