Week Two Readings

Suleman and Fox
Not having a background in computer science, some of this was a little hard for me to follow, but it seems to be advocating an open, simple, and customizable protocol for use in DLs, which seems like a great thing. Interoperability and extensibility are going to be increasingly desirous to DL user populations, and it seems like that's what this system is attempting to do.

Arms, Blanchi, Overly ("Architecture")
There's a lot of discussion of client services in this article, and I think I need clarification about what it is and how it functions--I'm not quite grasping it at this point. I like the point about how the organization of information should not be biased by expectations about how users will approach the material. I've also never really considered some of the levels of complexity discussed here--like illustrations within a text being created as separate digital objects, or a meta-object constituting various resolutions of a single photo.

Payette, Blanchi, Lagoze, Overly ("Interoperability")
To rephrase for my own reference, the key to extensibility is clean separation of object structure, extensible interfaces, and mechanisms that implement extended functionality. The concept of Disseminator Types seems to make a lot sense for adding new functionality to an object. My problem with this article, however, is that I could use a clearer illustration of what the authors mean by "interoperable."