Unit 14 Cloud computing, Muddiest points

Muddiest Point: What is a 'mashup' platform mentioned in cloud computing.

1. Galen Gruman-Clould computing. this is over my head, reminds of the Jetsons (TV carton of a family in the future). Interesting, you can rent space as you need it and don't need hardware/software!

2. Youtube- I could understand this. Online services from any place, using the Web 2.0. Sharing documents in real time, like wikipedia? When mentioned the small notebooks, that didn't need loading software, I thought of the new Acer I just bought. It's great, wireless, I can work anywhere there's a connection!

3. Future of Libraries- They must reinvent themselves to survive. Come full circle from information being scarce to being free & available. (But to those not connected, it's still scarce.) Great identification of trends. I like the one that I think is currently happening, a library as a center of culture, not just of information. Where people come together to learn about each other. we've got to enjoy the journey and evolve or we will cease to exist.

Unit 13 no place to hide

Typing in the web address was so simple, don't know why I did not think of it sooner. Anyway. This was an interesting and disturbing read. Our lives will never be the same because of 9-11. However, how do we strike a balance between protecting ourselves and protecting our freedoms? "Freedom is a dual edged sword". Excess either way brings problems. Think of the fact that it appears that plans for what happened on 911 were found on the laptop of a 'terrorist', but nothing was done with this information. I don't know if it was true, but consider that it was true, who dropped the ball, who can we blame. Because that's a favorite, must blame someone.

And this do not even speak to the massive number of aliens, legal and not in the country and the world. Do they have less rights as non-citizens? I am considering reading the rest of the book.

Unit 13 Security & Privacy

1-The video No Place to hide is not operational.
2-Interesting paper with lots of websites to link to for further information.
3-This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc.

Jeffrey Rosen-Is Privacy Dead?
Presents some interesting points on US & UK views of surveillance; believes these can be reconciled.
Facebook: Scary what facebook can do with material once posted. "Big Brother" & "1984" rolled into one.
Jonathan Zittrain-The Future of the Internet
Fascinating, humorous, and serious look at where the Internet is going. We probably need to have someone help get rid of the hackers, spammers, virus/worm writers that destroy sites and steal data. While trying to cultivate creativity, what can be done to protect form those who want to use the Internet to destroy.

Comments and Muddiest Points Unit 12

Comments:
Very interesting readings, understandable and found very useful information.

Muddiest Points:
Really didn't find any.

Unit 12 Social Software (11/25)

This week's readings were quite interesting. I particularly liked the article on weblog and social tags. It seems to me that now that I've had a little experience with blogging,(I did not have a blog nor followed any prior to this class),and finding info on the web, I believe I understand these articles better. I am a slow learner and need to re-read things a couple of times.

Weblogs:their use and application in science and technology libraries:
-presents a brief history of the development of blogs and provides resources for further reading.
-Great definition of a blog "...a Web site resembling a personal journal that is updated with individual entries or postings..."
-very useful feature of blogging software: the facility to automatically archive entries and allow for searching, browsing and reviewing of stories and postings.
-discusses blog use in literature search, its applications in science and technology librarianship (where blogging software is a great tool for those working on projects)
-defines RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds; Use of these in libraries, gives example of LISFeeds as a site that collects library-related RSS news feeds.
-Talks about reference and student blogs.
-Agree with the conclusion: "...The challenge for librarians is to become familiar with the weblog and its potential, and explore new ways to further its development and application in science and technology librarianship."

Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program (LIP):Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons:
-Had never heard of nor used a wiki before.
-Great tool to manage work in an LIP.
-Anyone can create a wiki.
-The name is particularly appropriate.
-Can use wiki to:
=share knowledge; use as centralized resource collaboration tool, streamlining work flow and allowing quick update of outdated info.

Creating the academic library folksonomy:Put social tagging to work at your institution:
-Social tagging is new; allows the creation of bookmarks/tags for Web sites and saves them online. (sounds a little like adding sites to 'favorites' websites)
-del.icio.us allows sharing of tags. (visited site, found great info on writing on line, editing photos)
-Librarians can identify the best Web resources in various subject areas and then tag them for patrons' use.

Jimmy Wales:"How a ragtag band created Wikipedia"
-Great story, ensure every person on the planet is given access to human knowledge.
-Ideal becoming reality.
-Neutral point of view; no biases.

Muddiest Point Unit 11

Scholarly publishing as a specific circumscribed example of scholarly communication?

Comments on Readings

Interesting readings; some easier to read than others.

Unit 11 Readings

Digital Libraries:
-Searchingdigital libraries is problematic.
-Searching thrawted by scholarly information contained in 'information silos'.
-Difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections & providing digital library services. (because looking for particular digital collection?)
-Ultimate goal is to provide problem free access.
-Federal support was important to evolution of digital library technology.
-Large number of ejournals now available.

Dewey Meets Turing
-Digital Library Initiation brought together librarians and computer scientists.
-Computer scientists saw an exciting way to conduct research and impact daily society in working on digital library projects.
-Librarians saw an opportunity for increased funding.
-Advent of Web frought confusion as consumers also became producers of information.
-Increased costs of ejournals forced academic libraries to concel subscriptions.
-Online publishing was good for self publishing but looked upon warily by academic world.
-Although access to information is containedwithin a technical infrastructure, core elements of librarianship remain constant.
-Hubs of core collecitons will require librarian sstewardship.

Institutional Repositories:Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
-Somewhat interesting but long and occasionally dense article on institutional repositories (IR).
-IR allow universities to apply leverage to accelerate changes in scholarship and scholarly communication.
-This was made possible by decrease in online storage costs, and the open archives medadata harvesting protocol.
-MIT and Hewlett Packard partnered to develop an institutional repository system which is now a model for other universities.
-An IR should not olnly contain its members works and make these available but also needs to preserve them.
-Scholarly publishing while different form scholarly communication, is a specific circumscribed example of scholarly communication.
-The effective operation of web sites chould be in the hands of professionals who are conversant with software complexity, secruity risks, backup requirements and other issues.
-Author lists cautions about IR.
IR's can serve as propellers of change for institutions of higher education.

http://www.pitt.edu/~eam99/

Here is Assignment 6.

Unit 10 Readings

Some were interesting, one was very dense.

Web Search Engines: Part 1
-Amazing amount of data being searched.
-Interesting that there's a politeness delay among machines.
-Speed of retrieval is unbelievable but having initiated searches & found relevant data am grateful for its existence.
-Ironic use of the world "crawl" which to me means to move slowly while in reality these 'crawls' are done, dare say at the speed of light.
-Agree wholeheartedly that:
"...Engineering a web-scale crawler is not for the unskilled or fainthearted..." So English & History majors need not apply.

Web Search Engines: Part 2
-?"... An inverted file is a concatenation of the posting lists for each distinct term..."
-# of machines & documents is astounding.
-?"... PageRank computation is an eigenvector calculation on the page-page link connectivity matrix..."
-Would say interesting article, not "fascinating".

Current Developments:
-Dense article.
-Assumption of "... high level of familiarity with how the protocol works..." indicates I probably won't understand it.

The Deep Web:Surfacing Hidden Value:
-Nice image of the Deep Web as an ocean
-Similar to today's knowledge of the ocean, only limited exploration of the deepest part because need special equipment (directed query) to withstand the water's pressure.
-Not aware of NorthernLight and Fast as search engines; nor there were search engines and search directories.
-Excellent statement: "...Discovery comes form looking at the world in new ways and with new tools..."
-Pure scientific statement: "...It has been said that what cannot be seen cannot be defined, and what is not defined cannot be understood..." or seeing is believing.
-Largest % of deep sites by subject areas with the Humanities leading with 13.5%, followed by News,Media with 12.2%.

Assignment 6 Web Page

This is by far the most difficult assignment yet. I have finally figured out how to write and get a web page to appear! Now the trick is to put it all together; at least I can say I tried. Creating the language is worse than Greek to me, no disrespect intended; it just looks like a lot of 'math equations' and it makes my head 'feel like it's going to blow up' to quote a fellow classmate.

Assignment 6

This assignment is proving to be difficult. I don't enjoy writing programs, I understand the need to be familiar with the technology however, once out in the real world, I will definity hire a webmaster.

Unit 9: XML

After printing these readings out, I can tell they are technical documents aimed at helping with the next assignment. I don't do well with technical documents. I think I will take a look at the tutorials mentioned in the "A survey of XML standards". There may have been other tutorials assigned previously; however I do not retain a lot, particularly technical information. So I will look at other referenced material like Doug Tidwell's Introdiction to XML" before I start the other materials.

Comment on articles for unit 8

I think I said this before, that these were interesting and should prove useful when working on the web page creation page. I am not a technical person; I start to "freak out" when I see 'machine language' and numbers. But the article on HTML was well described and spoke of the the challenge Georgia State University took in correcting its web site.

Beyond HTML

This was interesting article. It describes the experience of Georgia State University in correcting and coordinating its website. The original site had virtually no security, was not well organized, a lot of the pages were very different from each other, both visually and in content and staff experience with web page design ran the gamut from no experience at all to a lot of experience. To solve the problem a web development librarian (I didn't know there was such a thing) was hired and his first act was to implement security. The article goes on to describe the action steps taken to coordinate and implement a Content Management System that proved flexible, used current software and accomodated continual growth as well as allowed for customizing or tagging. It's main strength was that it allowed anyone to build a basic guide based on content as defined by the organization.

Muddiest point

I was confused thinking this would be covered in the mandatory visit to campus during Oct.30-Nov.2. I don;t know why.

I find the technical portion difficult. It's a very foreign language, but the tutorials are interesting and should prove useful when completing assignment 6.

Unit 8 Readings

This unit on HTML & Web Authoring Software was interesting, and technical so I don't have much to say. The cheatsheet will come in handy with creating my own web page. In fact this entire reading will be helpful for the next assignment.

For some reason I thought this was gong to be covered during the mandatory visit to campus. I must have confused it.

Somehow I missed the article "Beyond HTML..." and had a lot of trouble accessing it thru the library. The on line librarian was a life saver. I realized I had not signed on and that was why I could not access the article. Will be adding another post on the article. It looks complicated, with machine language in it.

Muddiest poiont about Khoa

While there is a notation about the url there is no explication on actually how to get the url. It's the one that pops up when you complete the assignment. I tried counting the other 'shelves' to find the number, that did not work. Only when I clicked on my shelf did I see the number at the end that when inserted into the url (at the end) provided by the TA did I go to the shelf. Maybe this is because I don't create or write programs. Unfortunately, I need virtually step by step instructions when it comes to creating files on the computer.

khoa assignment

Url:

http://pitt4.opacwc.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-shelves.pl?viewshelf=40

Koha assignment

While the assignment took a bit of time to complete (problems encountered with not being able to access Khoa) and then finding books, then going to and adding and adding; the biggest problem is there is no instruction on how to post an url for the bookshelf.