Week 12 reading reaction and muddiest point

Arms, William. "Implementing Policies for Access Management," D-Lib Magazine, February 1998.

So much of this seems obvious now, but this article is ten years old. It may well be that this influenced how systems work now.

Arms, William. "Chapter 6: Economic and legal issues," in Digital Libraries, MIT Press, 2000.

"Technology can contribute to the solutions, but it can not resolve economic or social issues."

Huh? Technology has done wonders for economic and social issues. Maybe this is a symptom of this being such an old text (relatively speaking) but even in 1999 people were recognizing the economic and social power of technology - particularly the Internet. The "dot-com bubble" was in full force in 1999!

Arms, William. "Chapter 7: Access management and security," in Digital Libraries, MIT Press, 2000.

"Data on many personal computers is unprotected except by physical access; anybody who has access to the computer can read the data."

I'm not sure about the accuracy of this. I know it's not true now - I'm not entirely sure it was true in 1999. It rather depends on the operating system, and there's also encryption. Anyway, I didn't learn anything new from this chapter.

Lesk, Michael. "Chapter 9: Economics" in Understanding Digital Libraries, 2005.

This, by far, is the most interesting of the readings for the week - it's the most current and the most relevant. It's very interesting that we haven't resolved these issues yet. And I don't have the answers, either.

Muddiest Point: None