Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Laurie N. Taylor September 19th, 2007

The Times Select is now free, which is great even if it is a little late. What’s better than this material being free is the reasoning behind it, which recognizes that having the material freely accessible is more valuable than requiring people to pay for the material.

As more businesses realized that creating and sharing information openly can be profitable–as with Open Source Software where the software is free, but industries are built on top of them selling optimal support documentation, support services, and more–then hopefully, hopefully, businesses could soon function with more awareness of gift economies and their model for operation. This in turn could be helpful for academia because the current, and very poorly applied, business-capitalism-market model fails when applied to academia. If more businesses realize the profit involved in gift economies, then perhaps the market metaphor could adapt as well and academia could again be viewed under the larger lens of building the information commons through a gift economy.

The only problem is that academia, like the New York Times’ Times Select, still requires money invested up front. After that, businesses can create a self-sustaining system. However, academia returns on investments to society, creating a structure that requires constant investments, albeit investments that have excellent returns. While the market metaphor will likely continue to be mis-applied to academia–in part because academia’s larger returns can be more difficult to trace–hopefully a modified market metaphor that at least includes the concept of a gift economy could aid academia as a whole.

• Commons , Academia
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Laurie N. Taylor September 6th, 2007

LibraryThing just announced that they’ve teamed with publishers to provide advance copies of books in exchange for reviews. After so many publications cut back or cut book reviews, it’s nice to see that some publishers are making sure their books are reviewed and that those reviews are shared. This is also part of what we may see more of as companies and mental models move from print-oriented thinking to web-thinking.  Book reviews are great, but it makes more sense from a distributor point of view to include them online where they can be slurped into other systems, shared, and distributed. Since book reviews imply literacy and access to books, the audience isn’t reduced by the switch to the online model. It makes sense, and hopefully LibraryThing and its reviewers will help foster more things that make sense by sharing those reviews with library catalogs and other public-commons systems for even greater effect.

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Laurie N. Taylor August 31st, 2007

UF Libraries now has a Library 2.0 Working Group and we’re investigating what Web 2.0 apps/concepts best map to libraries. Our wiki will hold our notes and progress, so it may be helpful to others. Of course, our use of any technology is directly in relation to our current systems - how we work, what we have, what we most need - so it also may not be useful as other than a case study. At any rate, it’s very interesting and useful for us.  Plus I get to chair the committee, so I’m sure I’ll be thinking and asking about all sorts of random weirdness.

What are the best technology-related tools for libraries?

• Commons , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor July 14th, 2007

I’m the digital projects librarian in the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center. This blog chronicles my work with the Digital Library Center. In the DLC, I get to digitize various materials including books, paintings, manuscripts, objects (like this biscuit), audio, and more. Digitizing materials is only part of my work, though. I’m largely working on projects to help people better access and use the collections, which includes writing lesson plans, grants, creating learning objects, creating mashups (like adding materials from the digital collections to Google Earth and Maps), and more.

Working in the Digital Library Center is fascinating and it’s not what many people would expect. While we’re digitizing materials and putting them online, it isn’t a fast or an easy process. We have all sorts of equipment and we work closely with Special Collections (rare books and amazing materials) and with Preservation (book binding, chemical additives to de-acidify and preserve materials, and all sorts of exciting tools, even some from the early 1900s).

The library work, materials, and tools are all fascinating, and the work helps build the information commons that helps everyone, including academia itself at a time when many people have lost sight of what higher education does–creates knowledge and adds that to the foundations of society, forever building more information for use by society. Digitizing materials, especially through things like the Institutional Repository, helps to make academia more visible (instead of existing as a powerful, but largely invisible force in terms of direct, significant impact).

As this blog begins to build, I hope it will become a space for discussion of digital libraries and digital media repositories in general. I’m also a game studies scholar, which is how I’m affiliated with Gameology, but I didn’t think all of the information I wanted to share would be relevant to games and even digital media studies. So, this is a separate blog for all of the exciting digital library happenings.

• Commons , Academia , Digital Library
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