I agreewholeheartedly with "there is no digital library, it's just the
library". And just the library increasingly has not only it's
collections but it's services digital and online (is digital reference
part of the 'digital library'? can you have a 'digital library' without
online reference? Forget it, it's just the library, but that library
better be increasingly digital if it wants to survive. )
But of course, you still need some name for this class of software
intended to be a platform for your digital stuff, possibly with
preservation, possibly with workflow built in, possibly not. But it's a
platform to hold your digital stuff. One of my local colleagues says
"digital shelves", which sounds good to me. "Digital library" I don't
like for the reasons Leslie mentioned, and because I've always been
confused as to why the "library" in "digital library" is understood to
just be talking about _stuff_, about collections, , when we all work in
libraries and know a library is more than just it's collections!
"Institutional repository", talk about jargon, and yeah, it's not clear
to me _why_ we'd draw such a distinction between digital copies of our
own institutional output, and digital copies of other stuff. But if we
did need such a special name for our own institution's output, didn't we
already have the word "archives" for that? What's the point of all
these new jargony phrases? They seem only to serve to seperate off
certain organizational activities and collections in their own silos,
when they ought to be integrated into a "single business" model instead.
Jonathan
Leslie Johnston wrote:
I have grown to really dislike the phrase "digital library."
In my last job most folks referred to "The DL" when they meant the
digital collection repository (NOT an IR, but a repo for digitized
library collections). Some of us kept making the point that "digital
library" meant not just digitized physical collections, but databases
and ejournals and licensed digital images and GIS data and faculty
publications and born-digital scholarship and so on. And even if we
used the phrase more inclusively, it seemed silly to semantically
segregate that content from the physical collections just because it was
digital.
There is no digital library — it's just the library.
Leslie
----------
Leslie Johnston
Digital Media Project Coordinator
Office of Strategic Initiatives
Library of Congress
202-707-2801
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
