A few things I have skimmed in recent weeks, for your tracking pleasure:

Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries

Jack M. Maness gives a good foundation for what libraries are trying to achieve when they develop massive digital collections, and how they might be used.

Web-Based Services Expected from Libraries: A Case Study

Satish Kanamadi & B.D. Kumbar examine management institute libraries in India and find them less than useful.

Promoting a Lifelong Learning Society in China: The Attempts by Tsinghua University (uo only)
Institutional Management in Higher Education
Higher Education Management and Policy , Vol. 18, No. 2, 2006 pp.26-41

A look at the results of 4 pilot projects that are trying to promote post- schooling education. Potentially a good look at current trends in Chinese higher-ed.

Early Modern Culture in a Comprehensive Digital Library
D-Lib Magazine
March 2006 Volume 12 Number 3

Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox and Wolfgang Schibel argue that immense digital libraries may not provide all that much in the way of access to older texts. Wholesale digitizing only results in piles of book, rather than “access to thematically coherent clusters of information.” They use the example of early-modern books, of which there might be 2 million in existance. For these, they want to see curatorial and annotation work done on the objects in order to make them usable to the scholar that does not have specialized textual training.

A: it sounds a lot like how I feel about bibliographic databases: what good are they if only librarians can use them.

B: we usually think that this sort of advanced digital collection only exists in Western countries. What sort of curatorial and interpretive efforts are going on in China?

Text, Information, Knowledge and the Evolving Record of Humanity
D-Lib Magazine
March 2006, Volume 12 Number 3

Gregory Crane and Alison Jones point out semantic and temporal problems with TGN and digitized reference works. As in the above article, they’re looking for more structure in their digital works. Perhaps for my project, a measurement of the ’structured-ness’ of texts and objects would be a measurement of quality.

Scholarship and Libraries in Transition:
A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects 

There’s a published report from this symposium.  This is good, state-of-the-art stuff, although the speakers are overwhelmingly Anglo.  Again, I am going to have to develop some notions about what makes a good-quality digitization project before going overseas to evaluate anyone else’s.

‘Imagineering’ Asian emerging markets: Financial knowledge networks in the fund management industry
Geoforum
Volume 37, Issue 4 , July 2006, Pages 627-642

If Karen P.Y. Lai’s assertions is true:  that Asian fund managers construct “interpretations and    perspectives” of Asian markets in unique ways, would it not be true that Asian librarians would do the same with emerging trends in digitizing?

Problematising power relations in ‘elite’ interviews
Geoforum
Volume 37, Issue 4 , July 2006, Pages 643-653

Katherine E. Smith’s article might capture what I’ve been after in searching out such a far-flung research agenda.  One of my arguments this year for wanting to do the research in China is that because of language and cultural barriers, I would not be presenting myself from a position of power (as one doing field work in a developing world or urban poverty setting),  but rather from a position where I am definitely the guest.