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Latest comment: 15 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
This list might be improved by categorizing the entries. What might they be categorized into? Government vs non-government projects? -Qeny (talk) 04:03, 29 April 2009 (UTC)Reply
Improvement would be welcome - I originally created this as a hasty dump from a related article where they were otherwise going to be deleted.
As to categorization, then IMHO the best approach would be something around their main content types and the user access models the library supports, secondly by their topic areas. Funding or host agency would not be a useful categorization, as most of these are funded by a variety of sources and so would tend to appear across all cats. The media format (images / video / sound / physical artefact) wouldn't be useful either, as digital approaches tend to hide the differences and most libraries are holding a range, even if some emphasise one more than the others (e.g. Cornell's birdsong sound library). It might be worth highlighting the initiatives to preserve physical artefacts though (i.e. media player devices) - these are generally smaller low-profile projects and are notable as a separate group.
The primary categorization should be (obviously, this is IMHO) about the user communities they support and the means of access. DSpace is a pre-print server for academic publishing, ARKive is presenting wildlife resources to an educational audience. These project goals means that two broadly "digital library" projects needed to build quite different implementations. That's interesting to people studying taxonomies of digital libraries.
Secondary categorization (academic publishing, wildlife) is an obvious way to slice things, but doesn't make too much difference in practice (if it does, you're doing it wrong and your metadata property model is too rigid). Andy Dingley (talk) 12:19, 29 April 2009 (UTC)Reply
