Assignment 6

Here is the link to my simple website :-)

http://www.pitt.edu/~jcg28/

Muddiest Point 11/22

I have no muddiest point for this week.

Week 12

How a Ragtag Band Created Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales

This was an excellent video! I really learned a lot about Wikipedia, how it came to be, and how it is organized and regulated today. I wouldn’t have guessed that it is more popular than the NY Times and that it is funded by public donations. I also found it amusing that it even has exactly one employee. Jimmy Wales appears to be an intelligent individual, but also has common sense that makes him good at supervising such an endeavor.

Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries
Randy Reichardt
Geoffrey Harder

The first half of this article just seemed like definitions and regurgitation of information, but I liked how the last half explained the relevancy of blogs in today’s libraries and how we can use them to improve our services, as well as communication between each other. I wonder if, since the publication of this article in 2004, many libraries have adopted blogs as a daily routine?

Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy
Xan Arch

This is an interesting concept. Apart from our previous assignment using CiteULike, I do not have any experience with social tagging, but it appears to be a useful idea. It mentions del.icio.us and storing bookmarked pages online for access from any computer. Is it possible to upload an existing bookmarks list to this site as well?

Using a Wiki to Manage a Library Instruction Program
Charles Allan

This article seemed like it was attempting to sell wikis as the only way a library instruction program could succeed. It would be a good addition to a library program, but I would like to read about a real-life example of one that garnered results as well.

Comments Week 11

http://christyfic.blogspot.com/2010/11/reading-notes-week-11-nov-22-2010.html

http://archivist-amy-in-training.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-11-web-search-and-oai-protocol.html

Week 11

Web Search Engines Parts One and Two
David Hawking

After reading the first article in this series, I can’t say I’m an expert on web-crawling! But it gave a decent overview and familiarized me with the meaning of the term a bit more.

The second article was easier for me to understand. The portion about ‘term lookup’ was interesting; I did not consider the fact that all languages would be included in a search, but that makes perfect sense.

The Deep Web
Michael Bergman

This is a good discussion and explanation of the deep web versus the surface web. I now realize that when I am entering a search term into Google, the results that come up are far less than I think I am getting. I always took it for granted that when I search I am getting good results, and if I don’t, then it is my fault because my search term was not optimal. I guess this is not the case if many webpages are so remotely embedded in the deep web that they are not pulled up in my search. The BrightPlanet Technology about which the author speaks sounds like a positive change for web searching, but unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve reached this level yet and it’s been almost 10 years since the publication of this article.

Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
Shreeves, Habing, Hagedorn, Young

As I understand it, OAI is dedicated to the distribution of archival content. The OAI has been applicable not only to archives, but museums and libraries as well, and the authors note the current developments of this project. I appreciated the fact that not only they discussed the positive benefits of this initiative, but also the shortcomings and where it could be improved. I also liked learning about the different types of initiatives that are taking place in the field.

Muddiest Point 11/15

I have no muddiest point for this week.

Comments Week 10

http://maj66.blogspot.com/2010/11/muddiest-point-week-10.html

http://guybrariantim.blogspot.com/2010/11/readings-for-111510.html

Muddiest Point Week 9

Will the labs for assignment 6 be recorded for online students to view?

Week 10

Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
Andreas Paepcke

I enjoyed getting a view of both sides of the DLI and what each groups’ expectations were. Librarians’ recognized that in order to remain essential they would have to get involved in IT, while computer professionals relished the opportunity to be a part of something new and different from their daily routine. This was a positive collaboration with a fruitful outcome.

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
Clifford Lynch

This was also an interesting article. I thought Lynch’s claims were worth noting; hopefully staff will recognize his concerns and try to prevent them from happening in their own institutions. I agree with his observation that faculty are spread to thin in the ever-growing list of tasks that must be completed; and often the most important task (teaching their students) is put on a back burner because the institution demands them to publish, publish, publish for the sake of the university’s reputation. This is unfortunate and I hope that it does not continue at this rate into the future.

Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
William Mischo

I think we were all aware of this fact, but this article points out the ways in which resource access is rapidly expanding. For me, I can see the drastic changes that have taken place in how I researched as a high school student, through college, and now in graduate school. It is great that information is so easy to access, especially when I don’t have time to go to the library. We just have to know which sources to trust.

Muddiest Point Week 8

Do you think that librarians and archivists will be more responsible for website design and need to be proficient in html and xml in the future? As it stands now, and I can only speak for archivists in a large archive, we have so much to do already that there is no way we would ever be able to tackle this as well as all the processing, accessioning, conservation, and many other tasks we are responsible for.

Links to Comments for Week 9

http://pittlis2600.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-nine-reading-notes.html

http://archivist-amy-in-training.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-9-xml.html