We received the following message at Ariadne in reply to Graham
Jeffcoate's article, Setting priorities for Digital Library research.
As the reply is really enquiring into work and research on narrowing the
social isolation invovled in using digital libraries, I thought some
people on this list might like to reply to Laurent.
yours,
Isobel
---------- Forwarded message ----------
The text below was a reply to your Ariadne article which is at
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue10/british-library/ by Laurent,
<[log in to unmask]>
The message is below:
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Concerning the social impact of digital libraries :
My work as a PhD student is "co-working activities in a
digital library : representing actors and supporting their
actions"
The point is that digital library will perhaps separate us,
and my work is to make the digital library a place for people
to meet, communicate and cooperate.
The number of librarians will not be enough compared to the
number of documents available, and I think using people knowledge
to filter, annotate, validate the documents is an interesting
thing to explore. Problems : validity, privacy.
An other point is : digital library will probably use HTML
(or other hypertext standard) and will be accessed over
networks. A big problem today is "getting lost in the
cyberspace". But a library has a native structure and I
would like to explore data visualization technics which
will help people navigate and cooperate.
The basic idea is "navigational maps" that people can
personnalize (adding comments, storing paths in the
hypertextual graph of the library, changing the map
appearance), and use it as a basic structure to meet
other people connected to the library.
(Tools could be added : searching the library
for specific keywords would activate concerned nodes in the
library map, and would allow people to decide if this part
(thesis, periodics, ...) is what they were looking for. The keywords
would also concern people...)
I think one must provide tools that support individual work
(so that people will use these tools) but also allow people
to reach other people in a digital library.
If you know a community that is involved in such research,
could you please let me know ?
Thank you,
Laurent.
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