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The New York Review of Books: The New Age of the Book by RobertDarnton
The Next Stage: Moving from Isolated Digital Collections to Interoperable Digital Libraries by Howard Besser
What users want
Diane Harley et al in Digital Resource Study: Conclusions and Next Steps (first year report) (bold mine):
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The relationship between user needs and the functionality of resources and tools. As this study is specifically about use of digital resources in undergraduate teaching contexts in the H/SS, it is worth noting that, based on our work to date, we can say that it is not at all easy for most faculty to use the plethora of digital resources available to them. Many want a one-stop shop in which they can find and re-aggregate snippets from available resources into a customized resource for their own use. In other words, they would like to build their own reaggregated resources, using their own materials, mixing them with resources they have collected along the way. How to manage the array of available resources and integrate them into teaching practice is a concern for those involved in tools development. For faculty, there may be an array of tools available to them for collecting, developing, and managing resources, but the efficacy and interoperability of these tools for the immediate tasks faculty need supported are questionable. And yet another challenge, for those directly providing support to faculty, is the integration of learning management systems with library resources and other course content. Current Learning Management Systems (LMS) appear to have limited overall functionality, especially since existing LMS may not allow easy integration with many types of digital resources.
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The difficulty, if not current impossibility, of re-aggregating objects that are bundled and "locked" into fixed, often proprietary resources.
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Managing and interpreting digital rights, which may include pulling data from one given resource for integration into another one.
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The increased unevenness of interface usability and aesthetics. (In some disciplines, such as art history, faculty may care a lot about resolution quality. Yet in other disciplines, faculty may create “hodgepodge” resources, often not caring about varying resolution quality from one record to the next.)
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The growing demand from users for granularity (e.g., the ability to search and find the one particular image or piece of text that they need within an entire resource).
The challenges faced by those charged with building the future tools to "re-aggregate" varied resources for easier use, include:
Christine Borgman from NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop - Papers / Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation (bold mine):
Quotes:
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People need to seek, use, re-use, create, maintain, and preserve information in support of their work and life activities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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PDLs should enable individuals to upload their metadata to the common DL from which an object came, thus creating community-based metadata descriptions.
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 management:
Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment by by William S. Brockman, Laura Neumann, Carole L. Palmer, Tonyia J. Tidline:
Quotes From Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment (findings):
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note taking is an integral part of reading. Scholars produce extensive marginal notes, annotating photocopies or personal copies or attaching adhesive notes to a text.
Scholars could clearly benefit from tools that could automatically track searches and link them to OPAC records or to full text, lessening their back-and-forth activity and making note taking more efficient.
In most observations, scholars used their limited knowledge of the search systems and their extensive knowledge of the search topics to milk every bit of information available.
In Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment (trends):
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...we observed a wide adoption of technology by humanists in ways that are enhancing many of their traditional work practices.
In Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment (conclusion):
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Each research library will need to weigh how it can respond to its constituencies, but we believe some concerted action is also due. As James Marchand, a technologically sophisticated humanist, has stated, "At present, the individual scholar who wishes to make use of the tremendous possibilities the computer offers him must collect his own base of CD-ROMs, electronic texts, bibliographical software, presentation software and hardware, font software, and OCR software. All of this is managed at present at most universities by a system of unorganized gurus. It ought to be done by the library" (1994, 145). Research libraries have generally not expanded their notion of service to respond to this position; as a result, they may be falling short of their mission. A blithe comment from one of our respondents is worth reflection: "I want everything at my fingertips." This may seem like an unattainable goal; nonetheless, it is the job of researchers and information professionals to figure out the best ways to make progress toward this end. "Everything," in this scholar's words, does not really mean everything; it means those things that make a difference in the scholar's ability to do work well. What it means to do work well can be studied, understood, and responded to in the information systems we develop.
