TechTalks Event
Where Is the Digital Library?
with guest expert Clifford Lynch
September 20, 2000
Audio
• Streaming
MP3
• Download
MP3 (Download
Tips)
What is a digital library? How do they connect with libraries as we know them? Should anyone be physically expanding libraries or building new libraries? What will we be able to do with a digital library? When do we get rid of paper versions of books and journals? Who preserves digital material, and how? What about e-books? Why did the government decide to fund the DLI initiative? What are its goals? What has been accomplished? What is the next generation of digital libraries? What kind of research is going on? Do we have enough bandwidth, storage, processing power, etc. to move ahead with all the DLI 2 initiatives? How can a university or an individual take advantage of what's already been done with digital libraries? How can a university participate in the various initiatives? What kinds of planning should you be doing? Listen now to our archived audio of Howard and Judith on Thursday, September 28 at 4:00 pm Eastern time as they explored, with guest expert Clifford Lynch of CNI, just where the digital library is.
Our Technology Anchor, Howard Strauss, refered to Vannevar Bush's pioneering article on the Memex, from the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, in his introduction to this topic. It's well worth a read!
Guest Expert
Clifford
Lynch has been the Executive Director of the Coalition
for Networked Information (CNI) since July, 1997. CNI, jointly
sponsored by the Association
of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE,
includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of
information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship
and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent
18 years at the University of California Office of the President,
the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds
a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley,
is an Adjunct Professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management
and Systems. He is a Past President of the American Society for
Information Science and a Fellow of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards
Organization. Lynch currently serves on the Internet 2 Applications
Council; he was a member of the National
Research Council committee that recently published The
Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Infrastructure,
and now serves on the NRC's Committee
on Broadband Last-Mile Technology. You can read about this latest
interest of Cliff's in Why
Broadband Really Matters: Applications and Architectural Changes
from the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly.
Co-Hosts
Howard Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton
University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.
Co-Host Judith Boettcher is CREN's Executive Director.
Together, Howard and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and
relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.
Background & Resources
Cliff suggests that two major resources are the D-Lib Forum and its D-lib Magazine.
- He's also specifically mentioned OhioLINK, the Ohio Library and Information Network
- The California Digital Library
- The Digital Library Resources of the Library of Congress
- And if you want to see a digital library with 160 terabytes of information already stored, check out the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
This must be a topic close to his heart, er, brain, because Howard has provided a substantial list of Internet resources about digital libraries for you. They include:
- The Virtual Data Center Project: An Operational Social Science Digital Data Library
- The Clinical Digital Libraries Project
- JSTOR - a large journal storage and access project
- The National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative
- Texas A&M University Library's Center
for the Study of Digital Libraries
and, from CNI, - its Institution-Wide Information Strategics (IWIS) document
- and its mission, background, and history document
- Most recently, Howard discovered Academic Info's collection of digital libraries.
- Digital Library.Net's resource listing is a meta-site about digital libraries
- The Cornell University Prototype Digital Library - Cornell works with ENCompass
- The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE
- The University of Michigan Digital Library Project
- The Digital Library Federation - "a consortium of research libraries that are transforming themselves and their institutional roles by exploiting network and digital technologies"
- Some international perspective (in English) from Japan
- The Digital Libraries Initiative
- The Digital Library for Earth System Education provides "access to high-quality instructional materials; access, tools and interfaces to Earth data sets; and communication networks to support communities of scholars."
- Virtual Continuity The Challenge for Research Libraries Today by Nancy M. Cline, from EDUCAUSE Review
- From Automation to Transformation: Forty Years of Libraries and Information Technology in Higher Education by Clifford Lynch, also in EDUCAUSE Review
- Access Management for Networked Information Resources by Clifford Lynch, in CAUSE/EFFECT
