The Systems Perspective
Dale Flecker · Collection Management · 1998
I preface my talk today with two caveats before moving on to a discussion of the issues that systems professionals need to consider in evaluating digitization projects and a very broad (and brief) cost/benefit analysis of the projects under consideration in this exercise. An inherent problem in discussing long-term digitization projects is that the incredible current rate of change in technology means that anything we say today might not be true tomorrow. This is my first caveat. We have probably all encountered projects in recent years where technological change between conception and implementation has made the original approach obsolete and perhaps has forced significant midcourse correction. Not trusting my powers as a seer, and being suspicious of assertions about how technological silver bullets will solve today's technical problems, I will limit my observations about technology to the relatively near-term future. My second caveat: I have a strong prejudice for the electronic service model being built in American research universities today. Most of you are probably comfortable with the assumption that our automation efforts should be oriented towards delivering services and information over networks, and that if possible we should deliver these equally well to users remote from our libraries and those within the library's walls. We have to recognize, however, that there are other models for electronic information delivery. I regularly encounter people, particularly from abroad or the commercial publishing sector, who remain strongly oriented towards CD-ROM as the delivery vehicle for digital information. That is not my point of view. I believe that the digital library is essentially a network application, and my talk today will be from that perspective.