Week 3: Live Digitizing

In the third week of class, we observed Professor Ballard demonstrating the process of placing digitized content online. He gave us the background information relating to selection of content (Quinnipiac's old course books), then demonstrated the simple task of uploading files. He usefully pointed out the difference between a scanned image and the coding of its content, a necessary element for searchability. The steps were simple, but nicely illustrative of the routine-oriented and often repetitive nature of digitization projects. In a way, the process demonstrated in the third week was reminiscent of putting a new book on a shelf. Scanning and uploading files are the simple and final steps in a more complex planning process, outlined in Week 2.

The Week 3 demonstration caused me to think again about how much of the process of building digital libraries really can seem like a behind-the-scenes effort. Uploading files and adding content to the web is easily demonstrable, while building an infrastructure, selecting resources, navigating file formats, assigning metadata, and preservation planning, are in many ways less tangible, though they are requisite components in the context of digitization projects at large. In this regard, I'd like to reiterate how effectively the Week 2 presentation, along with our textbook, have conveyed that there is much more than meets the eye to the process of building digital libraries.

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.

Week 1: Creative Cataloging

The first week's presentation provided a comprehensive introduction to digital library projects, from the point of view of project underpinnings and inspiration. It is clear from Prof. Ballard's background that he has maintained a strong interest in technological changes and their impact on our profession, throughout his career. The presentation, with its reminder of the profound changes brought by electronic catalogs, was both striking and grounding. By this I mean to say that there was a clear emphasis on the scope of technological change in the last few decades, but without the sense of anxiety, zeal, or glorification that is sometimes present in library discourse. In other words, the first night's presentation was refreshing.

One of the most interesting aspects of the first night's presentation was the mention of Quinnipiac's cataloging records that include links to images and JSTOR book reviews. What I like about this practice is that it removes the ordinary bibliographic record from isolation. There was a clear sense throughout the presentation that the library catalog is existing within a wider web and can be integrated with other resources. It seems obvious that we should be doing this: taking advantage of the ability to link to relevant content directly from the catalog, or even to enhance our records by inserting additional content. I came away from the first evening's presentation with a sense of the potential to usefully situate our catalogs and resources within the wider web, in a way that a lot of libraries have yet to explore.