Out of this week's 3 readings, Paepcke et al.'s Dewey Meets Turing and Lynch's Institutional Repositories greatly benefited me with a Cliff Notes summary on the past 10 years of shared experience between computer scientists and librarians. I felt great ambivalence to discover that the search mechanics behind Google started out supported by a federally funded grant, under DLI. If public monies first supported DLI, why weren't the powerful algorithms made open source?? Or at least revealed through a Creative Commons license which would still have afforded the authors the opportunity to profit? My take is, if public monies funded the project, then the fruits of that research should be known publicly, for the commonweal. Instead, Google is now a private entity grossing $400+ per share and whose algorithms are kept secret, under wraps. Frustrating!!
Second, I think Lynch blathers on rather incoherently and redundantly. He does not articulate in a compelling fashion how classic and revolutionary librarianship principles apply to the brave new world created through the marriage of CS and librarianship. His work seems to play catch-up with what computer scientists are already envisioning. We as librarians need to (a) first build a strong foundation of classic librarianship principles - (e.g., Ranganathan's Five Principles); and (b) think about how new IT can creatively deliver access and organization to the information flood. We need more librarianship substance and IT savvy-ness, not mere blundering about in the dark with fancy rhetoric.
I completely lost respect for Mischo's piece when it contained this dead link (http://www.niso.org/committees/MetaSearch-info.html). For those interested, the correct link is http://www.niso.org/workrooms/mi. There should be some sort of mechanism to help one find new permalinks that replace old ones!
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