In “It's Time for a National Digital-Library System” (The Chronicle), David Rothman makes the case for establishing something greater than a repository of digitized books. His “national system” would include:
A wide variety of books and other items ... everything such as textbooks, carefully vetted scholarly papers, user-contributed photographs, local oral histories, and multimedia job-training materials, as well as other directly practical content ... let the content be both formal and informal, dynamic and static, popular and academic, cultural and directly practical ...
Accessibility, mixed with realism ... The ability of the public to contribute items ranging from informal neighborhood guides to videos of news events ...
Interactivity and long-term trustworthiness ...
Meanwhile, “Social Media Lure Academics Frustrated by Journals” (The Chronicle):
Librarians ought to be especially concerned by what's coming out in these discussions of social-media use, Mr. Nicholas said, because "nobody is talking about librarians' being involved at all in this." The academic use of such tools may leave libraries out in the cold, he said. "There's a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done on the part of librarians, because this is their constituency."
