Week 2 Response

First of all, the over arching theme of these readings is interoperability. A large emphasis is on interchangeable parts: different tools that can be exchanged and used as needed by multiple types of digital libraries. This makes sense, and is a concept that has been around for a long time. Car manufacturers save time, money and effort by building their engines and cars with a lot of parts that can be used in as many of their products as possible. By making sure that every car in their 2008 fleet uses widget A to complete task 1, they can make a whole lot of widget A's all at once and put them in every car. If some cars used widget A, others used widget B and the rest used widget C to complete task 1, they would have to make widget A's, B's and C's, and each of them would require a different factory or machine to produce. That raises the cost of completing task 1. It's what one might call 'reinventing the wheel'.

With this in mind, it is completely logical to take this concept into the digital library environment. Why reinvent the wheel? Obviously, different digital libraries are going to have different requirements, so they can pick and choose their given widgets cafeteria-style. This lowers the cost of developing the digital library. Hence, this is why the the Suleman article discusses producing software toolkits for producing digital libraries.

Furthermore, it allows for different digital libraries to talk to each other if there is a common language. This is a concept that is not new to libraries. Much of the technology that they produced before the digital age was focused on sharing information between libraries. Union catalogs filled this purpose by letting people know what various libraries had available. Bibliographies helped libraries know what's new in their particular field. In the digital universe, libraries being able to share what they have and have the collections communicate is a logical extension of this philosophy. The Payette article gives definitive protocols and evidence of their success for the interoperability of digital library systems.

Now. Is the Internet a digital library? It is a collection of data and information, in a digital format, that is stored on various servers and can be searched and accessed. By that definition, it is a digital library. However, the Internet is not maintained by a given body or individual. It is full of wrong information and a lot of the good information is hard to find. Much of it has restricted access. Amazon.com has servers storing a lot of personal data, but users can't access it using Google.

One might say that the Internet is a 'bad' digital library. It has many characteristics that the authors of these articles are specifically trying to avoid, and problems that they are trying to overcome in digital libraries. It seems unfair to declare something as a non-entity just because it is not a good example of it. It is akin to saying that your daughter is not your child anymore because she misbehaved.

However, learning how to overcome these problems and develop robust digital library systems could revolutionize the Internet. Perhaps one day the recalcitrant child will grow up to be a fine, upstanding citizen!