Week 2 Reading Notes

After reading the NY Times article on European libraries' efforts to digitize, the "cataloger" inside me became greatly disturbed. I understand that, in an effort to get money from a variety of sources, every individual European library needs to make private alliances with variety of funders.

However, this seems that the final end product of digitization will be a scattered and patchwork network of European digital libraries. That would preclude a one-stop-shop model for European works, which I personally prefer for its simplicity.

Hopefully, after the vast digitization work is done, the majority of European libraries can join a single consortium and create a single search engine or index for all their works. That would be more efficient and save more time, than requiring everyone to enter separate URLs for separate search engines.