ChristineBorgman - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Christine Borgman - Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

From NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop - Papers / Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation:

Quotes:

Fostering such innovation requires that people have a set of flexible tools and services to gather information from multiple sources, including digital libraries, and to manipulate them for their own purposes.

Early research on uses of digital libraries is confirming findings from prior IR studies that individual users are highly idiosyncratic in their information habits. Their expectations from DLs vary widely, as does their use of digital data once obtained. We are finding in the ADEPT project that no matter how rich a repository we might build, users want capabilities to extract resources into a personal space where they can manipulate them. They also want to be able to add resources from their own collections and to combine and manipulate these resources

Personal digital libraries offer multiple opportunities to improve information manageme

Individuals should be able to download content from large repositories into their personal DLs. This should be a focus of interoperability research. PDLs should support the life cycle of information creation, use, re-use, and preservation or disposal.
Real innovations occur when people can assemble information from a variety of sources, in a variety of types, often from a range of disciplines, to create their own new ideas, frameworks, models, questions, and so on. PDLs should offer a rich set of tools and services to facilitate this process.
PDLs will contain a heterogeneous mix of content from a variety of sources. Some of it will be created by the PDL owner / user, such as authored documents, images, drawings, datasets, weblinks, bookmark files, spreadsheets, powerpoint files for talks and lectures, etc. Other content such as journal articles, texts, or messages may be captured from external sources. The quality of metadata for documents in a PDL is likely to vary widely. Documents captured from external sources may contain rich metadata from multiple metadata schemes, while locally created documents may contain little more than a file name, date, and type (e.g., the software through which it was created). PDLs should allow people to capture available metadata and to add their own metadata that describes their uses for it, no matter how idiosyncratic their practices may be. This will allow them to manage their own resources better and to locate content for re-use.
PDLs should enable individuals to upload their metadata to the common DL from which an object came, thus creating community-based metadata descriptions.