Muddiest Point

One thing I'm confused about is the difference between various google digitization projects I've heard about. Google Book Search, Google Print, Google Book Library Project, etc. Are these all the same projects but with different names? Are they different efforts?

Week 14 Reading Notes

Coming from a energy consulting background, the comparison between Cloud Computing and the utility grid was particularly interesting to me. One of the advantages of the grid though, is that you can be paid for generating electricity and returning it to the grid. For example, there is a process called cogeneration where fuel is burned to both produce heat and electricity. In some cases the fuel can be sold back to the grid, often in the form of a credit of some kind. I wonder whether a similar idea will one day be applied to cloud computing. For example, using a cloud computer processing to create a web-app that enriches the cloud could earn you some sort of discounted access fees. Just a thought.

Week 13 Comments

I posted on Justin's blog.

Week 12 Comments

I commented on Michelle's blog.

Week 12 Reading Notes

Social Bookmarking: One thing that really interested me was the possibilities for social bookmarking in libraries or archives. The article discusses the university of Pennsylvania's use of tagging to incorporate websites into the catalog. I wonder about the use of social bookmarking for the items within the collection. Obviously there would be some of the pitfalls associated with untrained cataloging of collection, but I wonder whether it might produce interesting alternative results to LoC subject headings.

Wikipedia: Wale's discussion of the vandalism systems was especially interesting to me. This week I was reading the Pieter Bruegel the Elder page on Wikipedia. It was clearly vandalized, as one of Bruegel's paintings was listed as being held at the "What the Frick? Collection in New Pork City (ha ha ha.). Sure enough, the page was fixed within days.

Week 11 Comments

I commented on Samantha's blog and Michelle's blog.

Week 10 Muddiest point

Is there any search engine for scholarly materials that creates a ranking system based on citation instead of links?

Also, I know you've gone over the diagram of the internet with the tentacles a number of times, but I still don't get the "IN" and "OUT" parts of the diagram. what do those refer to?

Assignment 6: My website

Here is my website. It is best viewed in Firefox.

Week 9 Muddiest Point

When an xml document links to another website for its schema, which I understand is an XML document, can that document be automatically interpreted by the parser? I assume it can, but I wanted to make sure.

Week 10 Reading notes

The readings covered the structure of web search services. Modern search engines use a sophisticated combination of crawling algorithms, parallelism, and filtering to crawl web pages. Indexing algorithms then collect significant terms on the web page, as well as additional information such as the frequency the term appears and its position. A query processing algorithm then returns documents from the index that contain all the search terms where possible. Search engines use strategies to make the results more accurate and to speed queries up.

Most search engines do not crawl the "deep web," that is, the temporary web pages that are produced as a result of searches on commercial websites, etc. There is many times more information in the deep web than on the surface web, but most browsers do not search it because it would take to much time to create searches of these sites then index them. Some search engines, such as BrightPlanet attempt to search the deep web with the belief that there are more quality results to be found there than on the surface web.

Week 9 Comments

I commented on Anthony's blog.

Week 8 Muddiest Point

We learned in class that metadata can be included in HTML (as in "meta name="author"" etc. Why do we need XML, then? Can't this meta tag do anything that XML does?

Week 9 Reading Notes

I have to say I had a hard time understanding the readings on XML.
I was under the impression that XML is metadata that is attached to HTML documents that computers can read to determine what the documents "are." Apparently there is more to it than that.
XML is a flexible mark-up language that can define what documents are. If I understand the readings correctly, it can also define elements of a document, such as title, author, etc.
It also seems to be able to signal to computer reading the XML to do certain tasks, and link to parts of documents.
A difference between XML and HTML is that HTML defines appearence of a document, while XML does not. It seems that HTML is soewhat restrictive in its potential for customization, but I don't see why HTML can't be expanded to include perform the same function as XML. Why create an entirely new language (or is it family of languages?)?

I also looked at this website. It may be helpful to some.

Week 8 Comments

I commented on Michelle's blog.

Assignment 5: Collection building with Koha

I made a collection of books on the history of photography.

Week 8 Notes

You can use HTML and CSS to customize your text, create tables, set background images and all sorts of fun stuff. I wanted to make this whole post blink using CSS, but I don't think that it works with blogger, probably because it would be REALLY annoying.

The article on Content Management Systems' use in libraries gave a good explanation of some of the limitations of HTML. The CMS provided consistency and flexibility to GSU's research guides. It made think about sites like this one. It's a form based system. It's customizable. Is it a CMS?

Week 7 Muddiest Point

In class you discussed whether or not websites we access using a neighbor's wireless connection detect our IP or our neighbor's. I didn't quite catch what the answer was. It's not for me, I have this friend who was wondering, ok?

Assignment 4

Jing Video
Annotated Image #1
Annotated Image #2
Annotated Image #3
Annotated Image #4
Annotated Image #5

Week 7 Comments

I posted a comment on leblancsatpittsburgh.

Week 6 Muddiest Point

When we talked about the asymmetrical nature of Internet connections, it made me wonder about how this affects a system like Cable Internet. For example, neighbors share the same internet connection, and when everyone in my neighborhood is downloading at the same time, it will slow down my download speed. BUT, if everyone in the neighborhood is DOWNLOADING at the same time, will it slow down my UPLOAD speed?

Week 7 Notes

The interesting thing, to me, about the Internet is how organic it is. It's made up of a number of local networks that are all connected to each other at network access points. There does not seem to be any overarching structure or administration aside from the Internet Society. Traffic is directed by routers, and for the most part, everything runs smoothly. Different companies agree to share the same networks. It's interesting to compare this with traffic infrastructure, which is closely administered, yet runs far less smoothly.

Assignment 3

http://www.citeulike.org/user/eweisman/library

Week 6 Comments

I posted a comment to Anthony's blog.

Week 5 Muddiest Point

I'm a little confused about the definition of "Lossless" compression. Why is a GIF considered a lossless image format if not all of the colors are reproduced?

Week 6 Notes

One thing that I found interesting about the readings and videos on computer networks was the matrushka doll-like nature of their organization. A PAN is part of a LAN, which is part of a WAN, and so on. As network communication becomes faster, will we really need the LAN? I guess it will still be important as an organizational and security level, but It seems that soon we will be just as connected to other computers in a WAN as we are in a LAN.

Week 5 Comments

Posted a comment to Amanda Pike writes about Information Technology.

Week 4 Muddiest Point

I'm confused about the MARC records. What is the relationship between tags and indicators?

Week 5 Notes

Data Compression

These articles made it clear to me why zipping zipped files doesn't work. Finally.

Imaging Pittsburgh

This was really interesting. Particularly interesting was the discussion of selecting a Metadata Schema, and a common vocabulary for cataloging the images. I noticed that they elected to use a combination of Dublin Core metadata scheme and Library of Congress Subject headings for the cataloging of the images. I realize that DRL had their reasons for going going with LCSH, but I wonder whether Dublin Core has a set vocabulary. MODS will have the benefit of having a built in vocabulary, I assume.

YouTube in Education

I have to wonder why we are using Panopto. I realize that YouTube videos are limited to ten minutes in length, but using some form of Flash video hosting would solve a lot of the compatibility issues, right?

Comments on Week 4 Postings

I commented on Anthony's blog.

Assignment 2

Pics and Thumbs.

Week 4 Notes

Databases:
In my last job I had to deal with databases that related to energy use. I had to quickly absorb SQL in order to filter and create tables, so I have a functional knowledge, but am nowhere near fluent. These were relational databases, and as far as I knew these were the only types of databases that existed. It was interesting to learn about Hierarchical and Network models, though I am having trouble visualizing them.

Metadata:
Up until now metadata was only the tags on mp3s, as far as I knew. It seems like almost everything has metadata. Inconsistency in the labeling of my mp3s has always been a pet peeve of mine, so I can understand the need for a standardization system like the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. DCMI's capacity to expand to meet the needs of specific metadata needs of different communities.

(About the DCMI article, did anyone else have trouble accessing this? I ended up using Google's cache version.)

Week 3 Muddiest Point

In class I asked about whether or not Google.com uses Google Desktop to search my desktop bookmarks, etc. From what I understand Google displays the results, but they are not archives by google. Here is what google said:

Google.com Integration is a feature of Google Desktop that inserts a line of Desktop results above your Google Web Search results. Although your personal and web search results are shown together on your computer, your personal information is not sent to Google.

If you don't want to see Google Desktop results on your web search results pages, you can turn this feature off. Just go to the Apple menu > "System Preferences." Click "Google Desktop," then click "Search Results" and deselect the "Enable Google.com integration" box.

It is somewhat convenient to see these results in the search results, but can I trust Google?

Don't laugh.

It's not done yet.
My flickr site.

Comments on Week 3 Postings

Posted comments on leblancsatpittsburgh and Anthony Micchelli Information Technology Blog.

Week 2 Muddiest Point

I understand that outline for computer hardware we received in class pretty much covers all current computers, but when did that model come to be?

'Back then, those people were called "nerds" or "freaks"': Week 3 Readings

I really enjoyed the article about Linux. I already had a basic understanding about what Linux is, but I didn't really know the history of the development of Linux. The whole "Open Source" thing really jibes with my worldview. I've been meaning to give Linux a shot, but for whatever reason, I just can't seem to bring myself to partition my hard drive. I don't know why, but I stared at my Ubuntu disk for months and just couldn't install it!

I've been a Mac user my entire life, but I could not understand the 'What is Mac OS X?' article for the life of me. I guess maybe it is a good thing that I haven't installed that Ubuntu disk. I could do some real damage to this poor, crippled MacBook. I'll leave it to the '"nerds" or "freaks."' The story of OS X was pretty neat to read, though, because I remember reading about Copland and Rhapsody back in the day.

Comments on Week 2 Postings

Posted a comment to Kerri Ciminera LIS 2600 Blog

Comments on Week 1 Postings

Posted a comment to leblancatpittsburgh

Week 1 Reading

Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers
An interesting thing about this article was the observation that, "[t]raditional information formats (e.g. printed books and serials) are not going away." While this is probably true, and books and printed materials will always retain some cultural value, I highly doubt that they will retain their cultural role as a key information source. For example, I fully expect newspapers, as we know them, to be all but completely transformed away from a printed media in my lifetime. On the other hand, I am not very familiar with POD, so it is possible that in the future, printed materials will continue to be significant, even if they are distributed differently.
Another trend worth watching as gas prices make travel more expensive, is the tendency of people to use online materials rather than going to the library. As it becomes more expensive to travel, this trend could accelerate.

Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy: New Components in the Curriculum for a Digital Culture
The article touches on a significant failure on the part of our education system. The author, in discussing the need for formal instruction on information literacy, points out that what is really needed is an educational program that "encompass a rather broad view of the technology infrastructures that support our society, including computing, telecommunications, broadcasting, publishing, electrical power distribution, transportation and financial infrastructure and related areas." It's sad, but our education system does not put many resources toward teaching students how the world around them actually works.

Lied Library @ four years: technology never stands still.
Moving back to the containers versus content issue, it seems that Lied Library is specializing in neither acquiring content nor acquiring containers. Instead, the library is focusing on acquiring
the technology for accessing content. This seems like a very good solution to the issue of libraries' role in the internet age. As the Information Format Trends article points out, there is a growing trend of users choosing to do online searches rather than using the library. Libraries like Lied could serve as a gateway to better searches that yield more useful content to users.

Week 1 Muddiest Point

A muddy point for me is the distinction between content and container. John Blossom's quote from Week 1's PowerPoint presentation, "It’s the experience of the content, not its mass-manufactured container, that I value most", seems to me to devalue the context of the content. Isn't there a lot to be learned from the so-called "mass-manufactured container"? It seems to me that by divorcing the content from it's context, we lose a lot of potentially important or interesting information about the society or persons that "mass-manufacture" the containers.

Week 2 Reading

The article on Moore's Law interested me in its implications for narrowing the technology gap that we discussed briefly in class. The National Science Foundation has a nice, short article that links Moore's observations on the exponential increase in complexity and performance of ICs, the decrease in their cost, and the increased prevalence of Information Technology. While the article points mainly to the spread of IT into new industries, the obvious implication is that IT is reaching more people. While it's true that access to technology does not necessarily mean an erosion of the digital divide, it does provide some hope.

One thing that surprised me, though, was that while the number of domains and information storage capacity seem to advancing at the same rate that Moore observes, the increase in the amount of information on the web is growing much faster. I'm curious as to what is driving that growth, if not technology. Perhaps, as more people and industries are being connected though IT, there is an accelerated drive to record information to the internet (personal, social etc.) that didn't have any real home except for in our heads. It's possible that the growth of recorded information could eventually fall back in to line with Moore's Law.