Correction on the muddiest point....

Actually, I do have a muddiest point... why does the calendar and clock seem to be off on my blog? I just posted my comments and muddiest point and blogger wrote an incorrect date and time. It is now Monday November 29, 2010 at 5:37pm. Watch blogger disagree with me. What is the deal? Can I fix this?

Muddiest Point for November 29th class

I have no muddiest point for this week.

Week 13 Comments

Here are my comments for Week 13, December 6, 2010.

http://lostscribe459.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-13-reading-notes.html?showComment=1291070101944#c6611539124977214063

http://megrentschler.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-12-muddiest-point-112910.html?showComment=1291069853829#c2846766013048517482

Reading Notes- Week 13, Dec 6, 2010

No Place to Hide website

This website clearly has a lot of material on it, so I just poked around and read a couple of reviews. The website itself is something I'd like to go back to and peruse further when I have more time, and I'd really like to read this book when I get a chance (winter break maybe?). Privacy issues are a major concern nowadays. I remember at the end of high school I said I would never get Facebook just because I was disturbed by the thought of putting that much personal information out there on the web within easy reach of whoever wanted it. But, due to the relentless efforts of friends, I gave in. With all the recent uproar over the new body scans and pat downs at airports across the country, privacy issues are making headlines on a daily basis. Sometimes I feel like reality is turning into some sort of science fiction novel. Any thoughts?

TIA and Data Mining

So there's a long going on on this site too, but long story short... The government has access to way more information than most people probably want them to have access to. I should probably just stop writing now... the government may be reading this blog as I type... (dun dun dun *scary music*). If they're interested though, that's cool. Feel free to leave a nice comment, big brother.

Privacy issues is a pretty big umbrella, so I'm just going to narrow this down a bit... what methods can be taken to ensure the privacy of library patrons? I'm sure some of you who have worked in libraries and archives before have dealt with this. What can libraries do to protect their patrons' personal information? What types of information needs protecting?

Youtube video

When I clicked the link for the Youtube video, I got this message "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc." Anyone else face the same problem?

Week 12 Comments

Here are my comments for week 12, November 29th.

http://att16.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-12-social-software.html?showComment=1290522760847#c2701905369596225051

http://kel2600.blogspot.com/2010/11/reading-notes-november-22-2010.html?showComment=1290522546144#c2134633679180877974

Muddiest Point for November 22nd class

I have no muddiest point this week.

Reading Notes- Week 12, Nov 29, 2010

Weblogs: their use and application in science and technology libraries

It was very interesting to read about the development of blogs. I had never thought of their evolution before. Blogs are a great way to share information because as the article said, it's a "bottom up" form of communication. So this allows anyone to start a blog and start sharing their ideas with the rest of the internet. I had also never thought of using blogs in the library setting to communicate with coworkers and such. This article focused on science and technology libraries. But what about other libraries? Does anyone think that blogs would be used any differently in say, a university library, or a public library?

Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons

Like the first article, I found the use of communication technology in this article interesting. The librarians were using wikis to collaborate on course content. I have never used a wiki, but taking into consideration all the praise they get nowadays, I'm assuming I will sometime in the future. I actually really want to use on. I think it might make group projects easier. Or at least sharing information about what each person is working on easier. It would cut back on the constant flooding of everyone in the group's inbox with project updates. Has anyone used a wiki before? Did you love it/hate it?

Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution

I think tagging in libraries sounds really cool. Sometimes you know that the information you want is out there, but you are just thinking of it in a different way than how it was cataloged. What do you think of opening up tagging to library users? Would it help in this manner? Or would it just put too much information out there?

How a ragtag band created Wikipedia

I think that Wikipedia has really transformed the way people think about information, both where to find it, and their role in creating and editing it. It allows people to have a much more participatory role in information.I think what really impresses me about Wikipedia is that people are so willing to spend their free time creating content. They're not getting paid, but they see benefits in what they're doing. I think that libraries could make a wikipedia type thing for their users. Like you could have pages about how to use different databases (some are sort of finicky, so it could be a place where you could add advice on how to adjust search terms for instance), how to find certain things in the library, etc. What do you think?

Assignment 6- My Website- Due Dec 6, 2010

Hi all,

Here is my website!! Feel free to check it out. If you notice any problems or anything not working, please let me know. I would appreciate it!

http://www.pitt.edu/~cmf68/

Week 11 Comments

Here are my comments for Nov 22nd.

http://jobeths2600blog.blogspot.com/2010/11/unit-11.html?showComment=1289873272994#c3646130006955890561

http://acovel.blogspot.com/2010/11/unit-11-reading-notes.html?showComment=1289873119013#c5823521273240565772

Muddiest Point for November 15th class

I have no muddiest point this week.

Reading Notes- Week 11, Nov 22, 2010

Web Search Engines: Part 1 and 2

The links for Part 1 and Part 2 about search engines led me to the homepage for Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. I searched for both the articles within the journal and found them, but couldn't access to them. All I could see were the abstracts. So I went to the ULS website and found them by looking through the electronic journals. Just thought I'd throw that out there in case anyone else was having trouble accessing the articles from the links provided.

I thought these articles provided a good overview of how search engines and web crawlers work. I had never heard of the "politeness delay" Hawking mentions in Part 1, but it makes sense because I guess overworking the machinery would put too much stress on it. Also, I liked the term "politeness delay." Considering how many steps go into crawling web pages, I am amazed at how fast you get search results back. It's hard to believe all that is going on in a fraction of a second. I am just so impressed by how quickly and efficiently search engines work. With all the junk out there on the web, I might expect to get a lot more hits that were irrelevant, but clearly a lot of thought has been put into designing these search engines, and they generally do a good job.

Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting

The Open Archives Initiative sounds really interesting. It seems to allow various groups to collect their own metadata and then share it through service providers. But toward the end of the article the authors described how even through everyone's using Dublin Core, there are still differences in how data are being entered. Will our field ever be able to reach a standard for interoperability? Or are there just too many archives and too many libraries out there with too many diverse and unique collections to make this possible? Maybe that's not even the problem. Is communication between different institutions the issue?

The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value

I am constantly amazed by how large the internet is. And I feel like because it is so gigantic I can't even imagine how gigantic it is. According to this article, when people use search engines, they are only searing 0.03 percent of the internet. That's crazy! How many pages are out there that you might want to see but never will? The article states: "Traditional search engines can not 'see' or retrieve content in the deep Web — those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically as the result of a specific search. Because traditional search engine crawlers can not probe beneath the surface, the deep Web has heretofore been hidden." It was interesting to read how the web has evolved and how search engines have evolved with it. Does anyone have any future predictions for the future of internet search engines? Will they ever penetrate the deep web?

Week 10 Comments

My comments for Week 10, Nov 15th, are below:

http://bds46.blogspot.com/2010/11/muddiest-point-118.html?showComment=1289274488305#c8845671163837204619

http://lostscribe459.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-10-reading-assignments.html?showComment=1289274196514#c8175607923355329919

Muddiest Point for November 8th class

XML sounds like it's really flexible and can do a lot. In what situations wouldn't you use XML?

Reading Notes- Week 10, Nov 15, 2010

Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work

It sounds like there are a lot of interesting projects going on in digital library land. The article gave some examples but didn't really go too in depth about the different projects. Has anyone used any of these before? What did you think of your digital library experience?

Dewey Meets Turing

This article clearly laid out the sometimes complicated relationship between computer scientists and librarians. There was a lot of discussion about one group or the other worrying about getting their toes stepped on. I can understand these concerns. But I think that there will always be rooms for both groups because they do different tasks, have different focuses, and different skill sets. Does anyone think that these two groups might one day merge though? Will librarians of the future have to have the technical knowledge of computer scientists?

Institutional Repositories

This article details the challenges and benefits of institutional repositories. One thing that stuck out to me in light of conversations we've had in LIS 2000, was the chance that it might shift control of what scholars publish from scholars to institution. The issue of control popped out to me, since in 2000 we've talked so much about digital repositories being open access and giving authors more freedom to publish what they want.

Week 9 Comments

Here are my comments for Nov 8th.

Zach's LIS 2600 blog

http://pittlis2600.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-nine-reading-notes.html?showComment=1288659674811#c1926928485211520581

James McNeil's blog

http://jrm170.blogspot.com/2010/11/118-reading-responses.html?showComment=1288659755871#c8157705901944824138

Muddiest Point for November 1st class

I am confused about how Jeipu got to the Notepad document so that he could type in HTML commands and then make it a web page. Do you just create a new text document? And then... how do you export this or something so that it becomes a website? I didn't understand that step. Thanks!

Reading Notes- Week 9, Nov 8, 2010

Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)

Is the link that's posted in CourseWeb for the correct site? When I clicked on this one I was taken to a page entitled "The Brighton University Resource Kit for Students" written by a man named John English. But I guess I can briefly comment on it... I think the idea of providing free information for the purposes of education is really admirable. Textbooks are so expensive. And, in this case, the internet used to be really expensive. Providing students with free resources, I'm always a fan of that. Furthering education will only lead to positive things for the individuals who are learning, and the society that they are able to impact with what they've learned.

A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004

The article says that the current version of XML was translated into English. What does this mean? Is it explained in simpler terms somewhere? XML is based on SGML and is supposed to be a simplified version of that. All of the links to tutorials and other sources look extensive. I like that the author didn't try to reinvent the wheel, but just led you to tutorials and instructions that already exist. I might have missed this, but XML sounds a lot like HTML to me...what is the difference? I'm sure we've covered this in class or somewhere before, but they're both markup languages. Does it have to do with compatibility?

Extending your Markup: a XML tutorial by Andre Bergholz

This article maybe answers my questions from the above article. It says that XML lets you "meaningfully annotate text." I see under "addressing and linking" some specific differences are listed. You can do certain things with XML that you can't so with HTML. The article explains XML in depth. But I think I still don't really see the differences between HTML and XML. Maybe it would help if I saw someone actually using it instead of just the figures shown in the article.

XML Schema Tutorial

Just like the tutorial we looked at last week from W3schools, this one looks very comprehensive. I don't really know what else to say about it except that it looks thorough and like a good resource for anyone interested in learning about XML and seeing lots of examples.

Assignment 5- Koha- Due Nov 8, 2010

Hi all,

My "virtual bookshelf" on Koha is called "Ethnicity and Festivals." The books are ones I used for my senior thesis which I wrote on a Hungarian festival. My username is cmf68. Here is the direct link:
http://upitt01-staff.kwc.kohalibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/virtualshelves/shelves.pl?viewshelf=42

Christy

Week 8 Comments

Here are my comments for Week 8, November 1st.

BarbCMBlog

http://barbcmblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/week-8-reading-notes.html?showComment=1288275985848#c6452390558516673425

Megan's LIS 2600 blog

http://megrentschler.blogspot.com/2010/10/week-8-reading-notes-11110.html?showComment=1288275744736#c1693838146472555349

Muddiest Point for October 25th class

In all of our classes we keep talking about information and the internet growing exponentially. Will we ever get to a point where the internet stops growing at such a high rate? Will things level off? Will the internet ever drastically decrease in size?