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.