Week 2: Nuts and Bolts

The second week's presentation provided a useful overview of the practical aspects involved in planning and creating digital libraries. The emphases on metadata, structure, and rights management were especially helpful. The presentation also drew on our course textbook, by Terry Reese and Kyle Banerjee. One of the things I appreciate about the textbook, as well as the second week's presentation, is the emphasis on planning and practicality. The more I read, the more I think that many of the issues facing digital libraries are incredibly similar to issues that libraries have dealt with forever, i.e. how do you select content? How do you preserve it? What are your standards for description and access? While we are applying these questions in a new realm, we should also be familiar with the nature of many of them. Figuring out how to acquire, process, classify, and describe digital content will necessarily be made complicated by issues related to preservation and rights management, but these are not insurmountable challenges, nor are they necessarily worlds apart from challenges of collection development and management that libraries have always faced.