Arms: Digital Libraries

Besides the useful list of terms and issues, a couple of things caught my attention in this article.

One was the idea of archiving and preservation in a digital library. Given the concerns over the transient nature of digital information, and the increasing proportion of all information that never sees anything other than a digital form, this seems like a critical area for research and discussion.

Second was the apparent sense that interoperability between digital libraries is a daunting problem. That may be true, but I wonder. In terms of computer adoption, healthcare has to be one of the most technologically sluggish fields around, but even so it's managed to develop a reasonably civilized interoperability standard (HL/7). Healthcare data is mind-bogglingly complex and irregular, so it's hard for me to imagine that interoperability between digital libraries can be more challenging. Funding is a confounding factor though. There are generally more dollars available in healthcare since it accounts for as much of 20% of the country's GDP, so even a small fraction of that can amount to a lot of people focusing on standards.