Using Massive Digital Libraries: A Lita Guide

by Andrew Weiss

Some have viewed the ascendance of the digital library as some kind of existential apocalypse, nothing less than the beginning of the end for the traditional library. But Weiss, recognizing the concept of the library as a big idea that has been implemented in many ways over thousands of years, is not so gloomy. In this thought-provoking and unabashedly optimistic book, he explores how massive digital libraries are already adapting to society's needs, and looks ahead to the massive digital libraries of tomorrow, covering The author's criteria for defining massive digital libraries A history of Google Books and the Very Large Digital Library, with a refresher on the initial protests of the scholarly communication community Practices of massive digital libraries, and how traditional libraries are evolving to integrate their presence A comparison of the collection development approaches of Google Books and HathiTrust Library applications, such as MDL for research in digital humanities, catalog integration through the Google Book API, Culturenomics, and the Google Ngram viewer Case studies of library projects with Google Books, with analysis of aspects such as legibility of scans, metadata accuracy, culture, and diversity Providing a solid grounding on the concept of massive digital libraries, and their strengths and weaknesses as digital information tools, this book will help librarians understand how they function and what we can expect in the future.

192 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Abe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is good on the subject of what massive digital libraries *are*, their extent, their histories, a few of the most obvious strengths and failings of particular MDLS. As to how they can be used, he doesn't really have a great deal to say other than the most obvious use is for access to works in the public domain, and text mining for those who have database access to copyrighted works. (The fact that, during COVID-19, some of us now arbitrarily have access to copyrighted works in HathiTrust on a temporary basis is a demonstration of the idea put forward in a recent Slate article, that many of the barriers in modern American life consist of status- and privilege-based bs.) On questions of instruction, Weiss does not really address what can be taught or learned using MDLs or how to go about doing so (that's a book for someone else to write.)

[Satu · Rating 3 out of 5]

's okay