Online Libraries/Archives

Questia (www.questia.com)

This site is an Online Library that can access 60,000 scholarly books and over 1 million journals, magazines and newspaper articles. It the line of text that says this, each type of informtion (book, journals, etc) are hyperlinks to a page with a sorted list of titles that can be selected for viewing. When a title is selected this tool bar is found about the text:

Projects

Bookshelf

Bookmark

Add Note

Quote/Cite Bibliography Highlight

These are representative, action icons that allow for one to do types of thing one might do while reading a physical text.

This site allows a limited amount of public activity (previews of any book or article) but one must become a member to gain access to the information entirely. In this way it is a private digital library, supporting Miksa's idea that the new era of libraries will return to something like that before the "modern library," which "generally represented the private space of an individual or of a small group."

Internet Archive (www.archive.org)

From the site: "The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural aricfacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars and the general public."

The site hase a box with the option to look up inactive site address of the past called "Way Back Machine." It provides access to archived moving images, audio recordings, live music, and texts (which are photographed). It also has an active post board in which users talk about various topics related to what can be found or has been found on the site. You can use the site anonymously or as a member.

It would be interesting to find out how the site applies the "records life cycle" that O'Toole writes about which are creation, use, storage and dispostion. In particular, it would be good to know how the archivists for this site explain the creation stage given this is a new technology of creating a record.