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.