I wanted to address the question "How are libraries and librarianship described in computer science literature?" To accomplish this goal I first downloaded about 4,000 pre-prints from arxiv which had been self-described by their authors as being about digital libraries. I then extracted the underlying plain text from the PDF documents and concordanced for the following phrases:

librarians are librarians were librarianship is librarianship was libraries are libraries were library is library was

I then removed all the text up to and including the given phrases, removed duplicates, and sorted the results. In the end I had a quick-and-dirty list of pseudo-definitions. Some of the more interesting are listed here:

a center of information, science, technology, art and culture [5]. an informati a collection of information sources in a place." * a collection consists of obj an external stored procedure wrapped in a table -valued stored procedure sphtm_ becoming less important to universities, while publishers have roughly maintain constantly evolving in response to scholars' needs. * convenience transformatio interested in building special event-centric web collections that humans can co taking the lead in offering courses in using, managing, and disseminating data today on the front lines of efforts to preserve data products and link them to

(The complete list is available at ./libraries-are.txt.)

On one hand, the results are not surprising. On the other hand, I would not be able to articulate all of these simple definitions, and I believe the enumeration can be the beginning of an interesting discussion.

For extra credit, one could acquire a different set of content -- say, bunches o' articles from the traditional library literature -- apply the same concordancing process, and compare the results.