Friday, January 14, 2011

National Digital Library?

"Someone must have declared open season on National Digital Library visions, because just in the past two months we’re swimming in them." Dueling National Digital Library Visions by Roy Tennant.
  • "Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex...It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet." So reads A Library Without Walls by Robert Darnton from Harvard University Libraries
  • "A library plan and related initiatives should include the actual collections, not just for traditional education and research but also for job training; tight integration with schools, libraries, and other institutions; encouragement of the spread of the right hardware and connections; and the cost-justification described in the stimulus proposal. Multimedia is essential, and Kindle-style tablets will almost surely include color and video in the future, blurring distinctions between them and iPads. But the digital library system mustn't neglect books and other texts" from Why We Can't Afford Not to Create a Well-Stocked National Digital Library System by David Rothman, the founder of TeleRead.
Certainly gives me something to think about!

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