Open Questions
While there was a general consensus that the approach to engage the library community through innovative academic courses opens up an important window of opportunity, some participants from a more technical background expressed reservations with regard to understanding the right level of interaction to aim for. Contrasting views highlighted the need for knowledge exchange across a broader spectrum, citing the members of the Policy and Quality WGs as good examples of bringing together experts from engineering and the library domain.
Giuseppina Vullo believes the integration between engineering/computer science and the library domain is already starting to happen, while Sarah Higgins pointed out that digital libraries need to understand and choose the right software to deal with metadata. “This is knowledge possessed also by digital libraries and not problems circumscribed to computer science“, she said.
In conclusion, Stefan Gradmann stated that “focusing on the dichotomy between computer scientists and digital librarians is perhaps the wrong perspective as the aim is not to teach them the discipline“.
A possible approach could be to understand how the overlap and next steps should be defined coupled with collaboration success stories.
