A Handful of Things
I Mankita, E Meltzer, J Harris - D-Lib Magazine, 2006
http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/
Necessary but Not Sufficient
IG Anderson - D-Lib Magazine, 2008
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/
Key Concepts in the Architecture of the Digital Library William Y. Arms D-Lib Magazine, July 1995 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/July95/07arms.html
Kahn, Robert and Wilensky, Robert. "A framework for distributed digital object services". May, 1995. (http://WWW.CNRI.Reston.VA.US/home/cstr/arch/k-w.html )
http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/
Most of the articles here were standard DL fare, from different periods, but the Anderson piece was very interesting. He proposes a staged model for the development of online archives in the and then looks at them in 2004 and 2007. There are 6 stages, from the very basic (opening and closing times) to Stage 6, a full Web 2.0 menu of user interactivity. Stage 4 was as high as the archives have gotten to date: development was slow but the online collections were stable.
There are some intriguing ideas in the model. Anderson suggests that Stage 6 may be in fact an alternative to Stage 5, rather than the next stage in evolution. Stage 5 consists of detailed finding aids--including some all the way to the item level-- and digitized items from the collection. Other elements include multiple search options across platforms, and contextualized help and features for various user groups.
The problem as he sees it is that archives may not have enough of their collections digitized, nor are they likely to develop finding aids that are detailed enough to point to the digital objects they describe. As he describes it, Stage 5 essentially demands that the archive become a DL. So Stage 6, though more radical in some ways, is less threatening (and much more feasible given limited resources). And there are possibilities embedded:
The cultural and technological shift would be greater than developing to Stage 5, but the long-term resource implications may well be less. Indeed, it may even be possible to harness the user-generated content aspects of Web 2.0 technology to overcome some of the problems of cataloguing backlogs and the limited range of digitised content.
Archives traditionally have unique items, described and catalogued in groups, and are focused on preservation more than access. All of these elements are shifting in the digital age. It occurs to me that what Anderson describes in his Stage 5 is a special digital collection--a sample-- attached to a finding aid. How useful will that be? Would it be more helpful to think of a finding aid as metadata intended for resource discovery? These are all issues quite separate from problems of digital preservation, which have ( as far as I can tell) been attracting all the attention on the digital archives front.
The other articles were either 1990s pieces about technical infrastructure and a how-and-why-we-did-it article about the Calisphere. Which is a nice site but as always it bugs me that the exhibits are so specifically directed at teachers. I want to feel like I'm in a museum, not a classroom, and that there are enough images--maybe sortable in different ways?-- that I don't have the sense that the exhibit is carefully assembled to make an argument or prove a thesis. Maybe I will look into museum sites as well, they may be more what I am looking for--Anderson mentioned some too, and while the item level stuff is different in some ways they are closed to archives than are libraries. And archives are of course the antidote to the spoonfeeding you find elsewhere. Even on the Web sites!
Additions to Reading List:
about researcher behavior
Anderson, I. 'Are you being Served? Historians and the Search for Primary Sources', Archivaria, No 58, (Fall 2004) & Tibbo, H. 'Primarily history: historians and the search for primary source materials', Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2002.
Greenstein, D. and Thorin, S.E. The Digital Library: A Biography, Digital Library Federation, 2002.
2 issues of Museum International devoted to 'Museums and the Internet'
