Saturday, December 6, 2008

Week 13 Muddiest Point

My question is about the Shibboleth AA Process - the concept sounds ideal, but doesn't all that checking and routing back and forth also have security concerns, as well as potential overload of the network resources involved?

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Week 12 - Muddiest Point

What type of software is required to provide RSS feeds? Is this usually part of a web hosting service or do most institutions administer it internally?

Friday, November 21, 2008

Week Eleven Muddiest Point

Are library staff building respositories themselves using DSpace? Maybe it just looks complex on the diagram, but it seems there would have to be an ITS staff dedicated to the library for that purpose.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Week 10 - Muddiest Point

I'm still uncertain about the differences between centralized and distributed indexes--why doesn't the distributed index have to harvest metadata?

Week 11 Readings - Institutional Repositories

This article was very interesting for me because my employer is a university. Our new library director wants to establish an institutional repository. From an administrative standpoint, it has been frustrating at times for me to find that institutional materials on past fundraising campaigns were not available, and this applies to many other documents that form our institution's history. I also agreed with Lynch's concern for faculty having to do their own digital work creation, dissemination and storage. In hard copy publishing, we don't expect to be able to escort faculty to the computers and printing machines to produce the manuscript, book or journal so why would we do the same with digital format? Even the simple systems can be daunting for people that have little training or aptitude for it.

I'm glad that there is movement toward making repositories a necessity rather than a luxury.

Week 11 Readings - Dewey meets Turing

From a post-MLIS degree standpoint, I was very glad to read this article, especially if the authors' are correct in their conclusion that developments in the digital library area will broaden opportunities for the library science field. Though the rise of the World Wide Web was an unwelcome distraction for a while, I think it has had a good outcome. If computer scientists and library scientists can continue to work together, the Web can be a valuable tool to showcase new library models and more; it can significantly facilitate the exchange of information between information seekers and producers. We will need to modify our ideas about librarians somewhat. I don't think we will ever replace (or even want to replace) the brick and mortar libraries we love. But librarians and library services will continue to evolve very rapidly.