Week Thirteen Readings

In a continuing effort to stay ahead of the game, I'm posting this a week early. First off, the youtube video for the week has been taken down thanks to Viacom. The discussion topic videos all work, though.

The two other websites scare the crap out of me, which is kind of the point. We've become accustomed to and reliant on technologies without fully considering their effects. As current or soon-to-be information professionals, we need to think about both costs and benefits, and what role(s) privacy can and should play. The links page on No Place to Hide is a good start. For Enemy of the State-style goodness, read the final chapter of No Place to Hide, the book, and if you want to laugh to keep from crying, go here (sound).

It's important to remember that just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Muddiest Point #11

So I just watched this week's class, and ontology-based browsing confuses me. As I understand it, we are talking about how search results (or anything, really) can be hierarchically ranked, grouped, or ordered, right? I recall now-defunct search engines like Excite doing this in the 1990s, and Google does it now with a hierarchy based on popularity. What's the take away from this? Why discuss it now instead of earlier in the semester when the weekly topic was search engines?

Comments on Week Twelve Readings

Here, here, and here.

Muddiest Point #10

So, I have no idea what's going on with the lectures. I feel like I'm at least 2 weeks ahead on the blog.

Week Twelve Readings

Let me begin my weekly rant by discussing how frustrating and un-user-friendly the Pitt library website is. Can I even access this article from off campus? I find Zoom! to be ridiculous--unless it’s this Zoom!, in which case, party on--and searching by e-journals takes me to Haworth’s site, which of course I can’t access. Serenity now!

I’m actually using a wiki right now to collaborate on an online poster in LIS 2000. Good times. Anyway, this article makes wikis out to be all things to all people, and that can be dangerous. Wikis are not a panacea and will be met with hostility from technophobic faculty who think of this when they think of wikis. They’re probably better used at larger libraries, in terms of staffing, than smaller ones, me thinks.

A folksonomy is “a taxonomy created by ordinary folks.” There’s no interoperability here because each user can come up with their own tags, and this has pros and cons.

Pro: it’s easy, and maybe even fun to tag stuff, and anything that gets people using libraries is on balance a good thing.

Con: everyone giving an item their own tag leads to a jungle of garbled messes and missed opportunities to connect and communicate. Bring on the semantic web!

The video is nice, but we've been using Wikipedia all semester long, and I bet most of us have used it longer than that, so this video is a little late for Lenny.

Comments on Week Eleven Readings

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Week Eleven Readings

Are we talking about actual digital libraries here, on the online components/extensions of brick-and-mortar libraries?

Seems like the latter in the first article, which sums up university efforts to digitize and make (parts of) their collections available online.
I thought the UI attempt at adding mark-ups to footnotes in journals was pretty cool – a very good idea since reference librarians (and me) tell patrons to keep following the sources and citations when researching.
There wasn’t much mention of what happens when for-profits get into the act, like GoogleScholar, Ex Libris and the like.

The next article talks about the Digital Libraries Initiative, a 1994 project by the National Science Foundation, which was complicated by the explosion of the web. I don’t have much to say about it, although I enjoyed the cheeky tone of the piece.

Institutional repositories are “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” It’s important to note that repositories are not static; as technology changes, so must they, if only to make sure that the information they contain is legible and readable to future generations.
I also liked that Lynch mentioned the rights of faculty, the producers, in repositories, as well as the role that OAI can play.

Fun fact, you can see my undergraduate honor’s thesis at Colby’s digital archive.

Final note: I wonder what are the implications of these public-private partnerships that Lynch talks about?

Pitt Website Assignment - Take 2

So, I still can't get the pics to load up correctly, but other than that, the website is operational.  

Muddiest Point #9

So, for the deep web, you can search a deep website like amazon or ebay via their search engines, but you could also use google, right?  So what's the difference?  

Comments on Week Ten Readings

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Week Ten Readings

The first article makes me wonder if there's something like a Moore's Law of indexing and searching the web. We've certainly come a long way. One thing missing from this 2-parter is the battle between Google and web pages that try to use Google's indexing/searching algorithm to gain in the rankings. Then again, as I tell my students, popularity should not be confused for accuracy.

OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative, and aggregates metadata that is voluntarily provided by either service or data providers and repositories. Why do it? To provide access to a group of resources in a single location (and then of course to aggregate those resources somewhere).

The deep web is a term I've never heard used before, and given how dated this article is (two weeks of data in March of 2000 and I'm reading it in 2008?), I'm not surprised. What constitutes a deep website? I'm still not sure after reading the article. Is it a function of a website having limited points of entry, so that what appears narrow at the surface goes down to the proverbial ocean floor? Seems like that to me. Regardless, a Google search in 2008 will certainly bring up multiple sites within Amazon.com, eBay, NOAA...

Oh, and here's what OAI can do for you: http://www.oaister.org/