Week 11 Readings

• As soon as I see the entity relationship model on the first page of the Digital Libraries article I want to do this:

• I feel that it may be next to impossible for we as librarians to offer our users seamless access to the information they are looking for. The "lasso" that we are using to try to pull everything together just isn't big enough, and no matter how much money we throw at it, I feel like it never will be.
• "It has now become commonplace for both major and small-scale publishers to provide Web-based access to their full-text journal issues and articles."<--- This is kind of sink or swim. In order for a publisher to make any money today, they MUST provide this service or people will go somewhere else.
• It's bothersome to think that Google grew out of a research performed under the Stanford DLI-1 project... especially because Google is worth billions.
• "Whether digital library work will continue to be interesting to the computer science community at large is an open question." If we continue to throw money at them for it, it will be. 
• "It is interesting that Google Scholar is being held up as the competition for both campus institutional repository systems (at least in terms of search and discovery) and academic library federated searching." I often find Google Scholar searches to be frustrating unless I am on Pitt's campus because most articles are on a pay for view basis. If I am on Pitt's campus it is more likely that I will be able to view article that I was through Google Scholar because it is part of a subscription that Pitt already has.
• Also, just because some our institutional repository systems are taking a back seat to Google Scholar, does not mean that we should discontinue our management of them. If we can find a way to make them better than Google Scholar, people will come back to them on their own.
• The problem that I find with librarians working with computer scientists is that we "speak" different languages. A certain word that a librarian uses could mean one thing to her, but it could mean something completely different to a computer scientist. We have to find that common ground between us when we begin our work, otherwise, a lot of time and money is wasted.
• "The disruption to the library community was greatly exacerbated by many journal publishers' business decision to charge at a premium for digital content. This decision has been forcing academic libraries to cancel subscriptions, undermining their role as conduits of scholarly work." You don't say! People would rather turn to Google today than to the library for their reference questions.