Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work (W. Mischo)
"As Lynch and others have pointed out, there is a huge difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections and providing digital library services (Lynch, 2002)"
Very true--I think this hits at the crux of many concerns I've heard voiced about the move toward digital collections. The act of digitizing content and making it readily accessible doesn't eliminate the patrons' need for help in navigating the collection. Creating a digital collection with no accompanying services would be like building a physical library and not staffing it.
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Dewey meets Turing: Librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative (A. Paepcke)
I really enjoyed this article. It addresses the tension between traditional librarianship and computer science in a straightforward (and lighthearted) manner; validating the motivations on both sides.
As Paepcke remarks in the conclusion, "While information accession now rests on a highly technical infrastructure, the core function of librarianship remains. The information must be organized, collated, and presented." Digital does not equal death for libraries.
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Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" (C. Lynch)
It's interesting to note that many of the concerns and challenges mentioned in this 2003 article are still being debated now. Just because technology can change things very rapidly doesn't mean it always does.
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