Increasing Our Vision for 21st-Century Digital Libraries

Authors

Elizabeth M. Lorang, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Leen-Kiat Soh, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

ORCID IDs

Elizabeth M. Lorang

Date of this Version

1-25-2018

Document Type

Article

Citation

Lorang, Elizabeth, and Leen-Kiath Soh, "Increasing Our Vision for 21^st-Century Digital Libraries," Opening Keynote Presentation, HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp 2018, Berkeley, CA, January 25, 2018.

Abstract

This presentation

1. Reads digital library interfaces—or their "main door" interfaces—as glimpses into what we have thus far valued in the development of digital libraries
2. Frames a visual way of thinking about textual materials
3. Introduces the work of our research team—where we are now, and where we're headed
4. Draws some connections between the parts

This presentation is very much a look into thinking in process and work in progress and proposes the following ideas:

1. As a community, we can do much more with the digital images we're creating of textual materials than we've heretofore done.
2. We aspire to have additional layers or levels of image analysis become part of the default processing work in the creation of digital libraries, not only as something that happens external or parallel to digital libraries, and not only toward the purpose of generating text.
3. We aspire to more processing up front and iterative processing of materials—so that digital libraries' materials are not "once and done"—and that this "more processing" is presented to users as additional options for how they can explore digital libraries, find materials of relevance, and imagine new possibilities
4. Even as the digital libraries community focuses on supporting computational use of digital libraries—and our research team recognizes that our project very much depends on that computational use being supported—we should not leave behind, in 1998, those users of digital libraries for whom computational use is not their point of entry. (More on that date in a moment.)