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Agreed that you need a label for the function/tool/platform. I have been in many discussions that went around and around on the word "repository." Some folks liked it because it was a reasonably generic term for a class of tool that had some physical association with a place where things are stored/saved. Some folks hated it because, well, who knows what the heck a repository is, and how do you explain it to people who have no clue what it might be or how it would be of use to them? Often these discussions ended up with a desire to come up with a name for the public facing service so we never had to tell anyone what a repo was but could tell them to use "Edgar" or whatever to add or find collections. Not that coming up with a name is any easier... Just as I was leaving UVA 4 months ago we started to internally refer to "Library managed content" for digital materials of all sorts that were under local control. It successfully draws a circle around a class of activities — managing and delivering collections housed in the local environment, but again, it draws a line between those collections and the majority of the Library's digital content — ejournals and databases. The distinction between local and remote should be transparent to users so, again, not so useful on the public-facing side. Very useful on the administrative side, though. Leslie >>> Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> 8/21/2008 5:22 PM >>> I agreewholeheartedly with "there is no digital library, it's just the library". And just the library increasingly has not only it's collections but it's services digital and online (is digital reference part of the 'digital library'? can you have a 'digital library' without online reference? Forget it, it's just the library, but that library better be increasingly digital if it wants to survive. ) But of course, you still need some name for this class of software intended to be a platform for your digital stuff, possibly with preservation, possibly with workflow built in, possibly not. But it's a platform to hold your digital stuff. One of my local colleagues says "digital shelves", which sounds good to me. "Digital library" I don't like for the reasons Leslie mentioned, and because I've always been confused as to why the "library" in "digital library" is understood to just be talking about _stuff_, about collections, , when we all work in libraries and know a library is more than just it's collections! "Institutional repository", talk about jargon, and yeah, it's not clear to me _why_ we'd draw such a distinction between digital copies of our own institutional output, and digital copies of other stuff. But if we did need such a special name for our own institution's output, didn't we already have the word "archives" for that? What's the point of all these new jargony phrases? They seem only to serve to seperate off certain organizational activities and collections in their own silos, when they ought to be integrated into a "single business" model instead. Jonathan Leslie Johnston wrote: > I have grown to really dislike the phrase "digital library." > > In my last job most folks referred to "The DL" when they meant the > digital collection repository (NOT an IR, but a repo for digitized > library collections). Some of us kept making the point that "digital > library" meant not just digitized physical collections, but databases > and ejournals and licensed digital images and GIS data and faculty > publications and born-digital scholarship and so on. And even if we > used the phrase more inclusively, it seemed silly to semantically > segregate that content from the physical collections just because it was > digital. > > There is no digital library — it's just the library. > > Leslie > > ---------- > Leslie Johnston > Digital Media Project Coordinator > Office of Strategic Initiatives > Library of Congress > 202-707-2801 > [log in to unmask] > > -- Jonathan Rochkind Digital Services Software Engineer The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu