Thursday, November 14, 2013

Unit 11 Readings

Social Aspects of Digital Libraries: Final Report

I really appreciated how this final report got to the core values of partisanship between the technical and social aspects of digital libraries. Digital libraries will need to coalesce these two different approaches if they are to become truly invaluable research and preservation tools. 

I thought the research into how the users assumptions and prejudices matter just as much as their needs when they are judging a user interfaced was an interesting way to dig deeper into what users are expecting. And the idea that reliable and useful methods may lose value simply because they do not address these factors. 

The Infinite Library

I wonder what the author's view of the Google Books project is now that it's exploded into such a mess of lawsuits and drama? 

Personally, I think there are both advantages and disadvantages to allowing Google's project to take place. One the one hand, Google was right when it said "At Google we’re good at doing things at scale.” Google has less governmental and institutional beauracracy to wade through. They'd don't have to justify the budget to a cash strapped library board, state, congress, whatever. And digitization on this scale would have been a huge undertaking, both financially and in man hours. It's very unlikely any library in the US would have ever been able to accomplish anything like what Google proposed. 

Of course, putting the future of preservation and digitaization into the hands of a company who could put the kabash on the entire project at anytime, despite the wants or needs of the public, is a bit terrifying. And that isn't even touching on the copyright issues that many authors and publishers had with the project (I personally think both sides of that argument had a point.)

And while writing, this happened http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/14/google-books-ruling-is-a-huge-victory-for-online-innovation/


A Viewpoint Analysis of the Digital Library

Unlike much of the internet, digital libraries have focused more on what the developers thought was necessary and less about the users needs. This article discussed converging the two. 

The Muddiest Point - Week 10

I do not have a muddiest point this week

Friday, October 4, 2013

Unit 7 Access in Digital Libraries

Challenges in web search engines


This article discussed some of the more common problems that cause search engines to return poor results. The discussion on quality is interesting because when most of us use a search engine I believe we think of our chosen engine (let's be honest, almost all of us use Google), we don't see it as a qualitative question. 

While we expect a search engine to consider whether or not a webpage has the information we are searching for I don't think we expect the search engine to decide if the information provided is reliable or not. 

Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2

This two part article takes us backstage to see what's happening when we use popular search engines to find webpages. 

Part 1 focuses on the complexities of the growing web and how web crawlers fight those complexities to return relevant results. Of course this is a game that cannot be won. As the internet grows and there are more webpages to crawl and more spam to avoid web crawlers will have to continue to adapt. 

Part 2 focuses on how the results web crawlers return are indexed. This part of the article focuses on page rank and other factors that help determine what web pages appear on our first page of results after searching. 


Muddiest Point 6

I have no muddiest point this week.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Muddiest Points 5

I have no muddiest point this week.

Unit 6 Readings - XML Tutorials

While these XML tutorials had a lot of good information, I feel some information overload. I think I need to do some exercises to really cement these concepts and the vocabulary in my head. In the future, these tutorials will be great reference material.

Readings:
  1. Martin Bryan.  Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
  2. Doug Tidwell, Introduction to XML
  3. Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004. 
  4. XML Schema Tutorial