Monday, February 8, 2010

Can you site (see) the valuable little scholars in the huge Sites or digital Projects?

Projects - their Scale, Time lines, Integration.
Projects - huge, large, enormous - turned into Web sites, after years of lots of hard work, funds, energy, visions, by lots and lots of people working and contributing together, whether Shadow, Rossetti, or Tibetan H. Digital Library. Is there a valuable role for the 'little' scholars contributing or even just making a little site around a topic, an article, a thesis or dissertation, a book?

The three - Shadow, Rossetti, or Tibetan H. Digital Library - seem very similar in their scale and how long and how much it took to develop them. S and R are now 'complete' while THL continues. What is the message here? All three are very academic orientated, whereas THL seems to have a very conscious goal of serving and including the 'community.'

In this New Media - is there a space for the 'little' scholar to develop a limited but open web site, and what might it include or exclude - should it also allow contributions and collaboration, besides just comments and feedback, and would that affect its academic-ness? Might other larger projects scan or go out and search proactively for web pages of 'little' scholars which they could add on?

What is the difference between the S R & T hugh projects, and journals which are focused topics (like project sites), or databases / web sites focused on subject data (such as the collection of materials by the Digital South Asia Library or http://dsal.uchicago.edu/). How much effort should there be for good interfaces and navigation, and a obvious, stated vision of how the different components are integrated into a single web site?

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