theorywatch

One of the other people I’d consider a “collection theorist” at Cornell is Bill Arms, professor in the computer science department. His 2000 book Digital Libraries is available online, as is his notorious 2000 piece “Automated Digital Libraries: How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of Professional Librarianship?”in D-Lib, which was not well received by the academic library community, to put it bluntly.

He is currently working on an NSF-funded project on very large-scale digital libraries, about which he says “With disappointingly few exceptions, the digital libraries community has paid little attention to the questions of how to manage these very large collections and how to support researchers in using them. Academic libraries and digital library researchers have largely abandoned large-scale digital libraries to commercial companies and the not-for-profit Internet Archive. This is doubly unfortunate: it isolates universities from a vibrant area of research and innovation, and it forces libraries into alliances with commercial companies that they may regret in the long term.”

Although I’m trying hard not to push all of this history and future on our current Digital Collections class (unlike my bad old ways in semesters past!), it might be useful for some to be up on Arms.