Week 5 Reading Notes

Introduction to Metadata, pathways to Digital Information: 1: Setting the Stage

“Webpage title tags, folksonomies, and social bookmarks” (page 1)

These are all forms of metadata that average media creators and consumers (those outside of the information professions) come into contact with. I recently heard about folksonomies in LIS 2000 and I think they are associated with user-generated tagging (such as, in an online catalog). 

I never realized metadata was so important to assessing the authority of an author or document.

Metadata relates to information at the item, aggregation, and system levels. How can we look at a system as a single information object?

Library metadata includes abstracts, indexes, and bibliographic records. Is this why academic papers always have an abstract, and did this practice originate in libraries as ways to make documents easier to access?

The author briefly introduces the concept of automated metadata. I have to wonder, would automated bibliographic records and abstracts be as useful or accurate as those created by librarians? What standards would need to be enacted to ensure their accuracy?

The author points out a barrier to collaboration across fields such as libraries, museums, and archives - that the structures and understandings implicit in metadata are unique to each field. Each field has different users, expectations, vocabularies, and practices. This reminds me of an earlier article that we read about cross-disciplinary collaboration in digitizing objects - “Imaging Pittsburgh: Creating a shared gateway to digital image collections of the Pittsburgh region”. It seems that collaboration works well in in digitization projects (at least the one we read about) but not so well with metadata.

The author makes an interesting point about how traditional metadata standards were paper-centric and baffled average users (non-scholars) who were not used to their format. I wonder if the search for metadata is becoming more user-friendly in the digital age as more people are media-creators and disseminators. 

Metadata “provides some of the information that an information professional might have provided in a traditional, in-person reference or research setting”. Is metadata putting reference librarians out of business? Is this why reference librarians are moving away from the desk and roving around libraries, to provide reference services in more convenient ways, similar to the convenience of an online search?

Using metadata in image digitization - that’s what we did in Assignment 1 when we included descriptions of our photos in Flickr!

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) uses a small, generic set of metadata elements that can be used across disciplines for searches on the internet. Ensures that different types of metadata are interoperable. 

Folksonomies - is using a hashtag on Twitter an example of a folksonomy?

After reading this article, I have a better understanding of why metadata is so important to libraries. It makes it possible to catalog and organize information, and thorough metadata makes it easier for users to access information and will keep it in the historical record (with context intact) for years to come. 

An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model

Is the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative complete or still in progress? It seems like an enormous endeavor to find standard vocabularies for descriptive metadata across several disciplines. I wonder how user-generated vocabularies would fit into this equation. 

Using Mendeley for Research Management

I have heard Mendeley mentioned in other LIS classes but not discovered what it really was until now. The creators of Mendeley are the same creators of Last.Fm - what an interesting pair!

Mendeley is a social network - this goes along with much of the movement towards Web 2.0. 

Mendeley seems like a useful tool to be familiar with in graduate school and education in general. I just downloaded and will explore it for myself! 

Week 4 Muddiest Points

Could one say that the "foreign key" denotes the relationship between two entities in a database?

Week 4 Reading Notes

Notes and thoughts on the Wikipedia database article 

“Outside the world of professional information technology, the term database is sometimes used casually to refer to any collection of data (perhaps a spreadsheet, maybe even a card index).”

- This is just what I was thinking as I began reading this article! I think the word “database” is overused and often construed to represent a spreadsheet. I have a better idea what it means now that I’m an LIS graduate student, but prior to this experience I thought a database was any kind of chart/spreadsheet - like an Excel spreadsheet, for instance. 

- Databases are “organized to model relevant aspects of reality in a way that supports processes requiring this information”.

“Well-known DBMSs include MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle, SAP, dBASE, FoxPro, IBM DB2, LibreOffice Base and FileMaker Pro.”

- The only ones I’ve ever heard of are SQL and Microsoft Access! Wow, I have a lot to learn. I wonder what the Mac DBMS is and if I already have it on my computer.

“A cloud database relies on cloud technology. Both the database and most of its DBMS reside remotely, "in the cloud," while its applications are both developed by programmers and later maintained and utilized by (application's) end-users through a web browser and Open APIs.”

- It looks like the trend toward cloud-based computing is also applicable to databases and DBMSs.

“One way to classify databases involves the type of their contents, for example: bibliographic, document-text, statistical, or multimedia objects. Another way is by their application area, for example: accounting, music compositions, movies, banking, manufacturing, or insurance. A third way is by some technical aspect, such as the database structure or interface type.”

- I didn’t know there were so many database types! I'm also guessing that ibliographic databases are prolific in libraries. 

“Hypertext databases are particularly useful for organizing large amounts of disparate information. For example, they are useful for organizing online encyclopedias, where users can conveniently jump around the text. The World Wide Web is thus a large distributed hypertext database.”

- I think this is a really interesting way to think about the internet. It makes me view it in a slightly different light. Before this class, I never really thought about the infrastructure of the internet.

“It also contains all the information needed (e.g., metadata, "data about the data", and internal data structures) to reconstruct the conceptual level and external level from the internal level when needed.”

- I’ve been hearing the word “metadata” a lot since I entered the LIS program so I’m interested to learn more about it.

Notes and thoughts on the entity–relationship model

“In software engineering, an entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing a database in an abstract way.”

- I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with this information. I can’t visualize the way a database is managed/operated only through reading articles. 

"The three models: Conceptual Database, Logical Database, Physical."

- Is one of these the predominant model for public library data storage?

Notes and thoughts on the database normalization process article

“Things to memorize before normalizing:

1. No repeating elements or groups of elements

2. No partial dependencies on a concatenated key

3. No dependencies on non-key attributes”

- I think the normalization process of putting data into a true database (and not just an Excel spreadsheet) allows us to find the answers to more complicated questions regarding the relationships within the data set.

“rows/columns are the same as tuples/attributes”

- This terminology is already a little confusing to me! I’m glad the author of this article is breaking it down into simpler language.

“Our database schema now satisfies the two requirements of First Normal Form: atomicity and uniqueness. Thus it fulfills the most basic criterion of a relational database.”

- The articles from this week were a little difficult for me to visualize and understand so I watched some YouTube videos for more visual examples. I’m also looking forward to discussing this in class on September 23rd. 

Week 3 Muddiest Point

I don't have a muddiest point from the lecture this week. After the readings and the thorough presentation on data compression I think I have a pretty solid (yet basic) understanding of the differences between lossy and lossless compression.

LIS 2600 Lab 3: Jing Screen Capture

LIS 2600 Lab 3: Jing Screen Capture, a set on Flickr.

Here's a link to my Jing Screen capture on Flickr.

Week 3 lab - Jing

View my video capture on Screencast:
http://screencast.com/t/OMRRkfWmnV

Week 3 Reading Notes

Data Compression article on Wikipedia

Data compression: I remember encountering this term for the first time as a teenager, when I was an avid CD burner. I remember learning that each time you burned a CD, it got further away from the original sound recording, and lost sound quality as it compressed. Thanks to this article I know this is true and that the phenomenon has a name: digital generation loss.

Claude Shannon: I remember reading about him in the book The Information: A History, A theory, A Flood. He was described as the founder of information theory. 

Lossy audio compression: So this is how an mp3 is made! And the sound on DVDs, digital television, online streaming...this is very prevalent. 

Lossless audio compression: I'm familiar with this through audio files such as FLAC. I know they take up more space than an mp3 and now I think I understand why!

Data Compression Basics article

I like the author’s straight-forward language in this article - for someone with little knowledge of data compression and the associated terminology, this is very helpful.

I’m beginning to understand the algorithms behind data compression through the author’s examples: “AAAAAAAAAABBCDEEFFFFFFFFFFFFFGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG = 10A 2B 1C 1D 2E 13F 17G” (http://dvd-hq.info/data_compression_1.php)
I’m also gaining better understanding of difference between lossless (which is the only type of compression covered in part 1) and lossy compression (part 2). Lossless compression allows the result of the compression to be identical to the original; lossy compression doesn’t necessarily in identical data. 

Run-length coding - RLE - compresses sequences in the data. 

Entropy coding - assigns codes to blocks of data.

Imaging Pittsburgh: Creating a shared gateway to digital image collections of the Pittsburgh region

I enjoy reading about this project as it relates to something I think is very important to the survival of LIS institutions - collaboration. In this project, the University of Pittsburgh (University’s Archives Service Center) collaborated with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania to provide access to thousands of visual images through one site. I enjoyed exploring the website here:

http://digital.library.pitt.edu/pittsburgh/

I think this article points out a very interesting result of digitizing and preserving photographs - we can literally see the changes that have taken place in Pittsburgh throughout the years. Providing easier public access to these photographs will allow the community to connect with and better understand the past.

“The content partners are especially interested in providing an image reproduction service to help generate income for their respective institution.”

This is a clever way to profit from this project. The collection is free to browse but users have the option to purchase reproductions of the images they see. 

Communication challenges: “This simply confirms the inherent difficulty of communicating across institutional boundaries. Or does it? Speaking as project leader, it’s difficult for me to judge whether the silence means everyone knows exactly what to do and are doing just that, or they are so busy doing other jobs that they don’t have time to communicate.”

“Our museum friends tend to view their image collections as works of art with intrinsic value as a photograph. The academic archives tend to view their image collections for utilitarian purposes with minimal description, while the historical society’s practice has been to provide contextual information that not only describes the image, but informs the reader about the history and impact of an area or person depicted by the image.”

I like reading about the challenges the creators faced in this project. The communication challenges point out something that should be considered throughout any collaborative project - how can we keep up a dialogue and when is it necessary? How do we mission our missions and viewpoints to make a project successful?

Workflow challenges: “Although each institution did devise a workflow based on institutional practice, barriers, and handling and security issues, it was interesting to see that when these workflows were shared with the project team, ideas were exchanged that caused each institution to reconsider its method and incorporate new (and often better) ideas.”

This is just one of the benefits of collaboration - we can always learn something new!

YouTube and Libraries: It Could be a Beautiful Relationship

I think this is a great example of incorporating a free resource for use in libraries. I think a lot of libraries already utilize YouTube (probably more than in 2007). I am particularly interested in how it could be used in children’s and youth services. Perhaps it could be used in programs centered on creative collaboration or film-making. 

Week 2 Muddiest Point

I don't have a Muddiest Point from the lecture this week.

Week 2 Reading Notes

European Libraries Face Problems in Digitalizing 

• This article was written in 2007 so I researched the present state of the European Digital Library. The project appears to be doing well with access to 48 distinct library collections, over 18,644,265 digital items and 119,246,208 bibliographic records. (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/)
• I also think this article links nicely with the article about the Google Books Project. This article illustrates the challenges faced by European libraries as they try to digitize their collections and the later explains some of the benefits of a partnership with a company like Google.

' "The basic problem is that there isn't enough money to digitize everything we want to," said Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections at the British national library, which is digitizing 100,000 out-of-print books from the 19th century with its partner, Microsoft.'

• This is interesting to me as I’ve never considered the possibility of libraries partnering with private companies such as Google or Microsoft. After reading about the Google Books Project I'm starting to see the benefits although I'd like to learn more, particularly about the drawbacks. 

' "We're aware that there are some downsides to it because the commercial companies are obviously in it either for shareholder profit or doing it to get a public feel-good factor. We're aware and we're not going to be caught out." '

• Bury acknowledges that there are downsides to partnering with private companies who have their own profit at heart, but what are they specifically? What are the details of a partnership between a library like the European Digital Library and for-profit companies? Does the library pay the company for its services? 
• If this model of partnership with private companies is successful, could it be applied to public libraries who are suffering from financial instability?

Lied Library @ Four Years: Technology Never Stands Still

"Major installations occurring after the library opened include EZProxy[1] for provisioning off-site access to licensed electronic resources, DiMeMa/OCLC’s CONTENTdm digital content management system[2] for digital project development and access, OCLC’s question point virtual reference software[3]; Serial Solutions A to Z Title List[4] to help provide better access to the library’s electronic serials, and SFX link resolver software[5] to help provide more seamless searching of library electronic resources." (page 35)

• Many of these software packages are new to me (except for EZProxy which is used by Pitt).

"One of the most exciting new projects has been the installation of an internet 2 access grid within Lied Library." (page 35)

• I have never heard of Internet 2 either. After looking at their website (http://www.internet2.edu), I think Internet 2 is a great example of collaboration between a variety of organizations. Are many academic libraries a part of this "club? What about Pitt?

'The library had multiple software images accommodating diverse needs, including Collaborative Learning Center PCs, ADA workstations, graphics workstation PCs, microform scanner PCs, etc. PC installations began 16 July, after which the library waited a complete week to observe any problems before additional installations occurred." (page 37)

• In LIS 2000 I have been investigating the trend of libraries becoming more collaborative spaces. It seems that Lied Library was already taking this approach with their Collaborative Learning Center PCs.

"Clearly, the future will be interesting and it is quite likely the libraries will have a mixed bag regarding vendor support." (page 40)

• I’m sure this is a huge concern for libraries everywhere as technology is continually advancing and new technologies are constantly emerging. 

"While the library currently does not possess hard and fast data showing the precise breakdown of what user groups are most heavily using the library computers over time, snapshots of semester login data indicate that approximately 90 percent of all logins are UNLV faculty, staff, and students, with the remaining 10 percent broadly lumped into “community use”." (page 41)

• The fact that academic libraries such as Lied Library are open to the public is news to me! I never realized that even academic libraries must consider the needs of the community outside of the university campus.

"As has oftentimes been experienced in public libraries, community users are not in an academic program and come to surf the web, check their e-mail, and play games, as opposed to “academic” work. Certainly, students pursue such leisure activities as well. In contrast, whereas students often have

classes to go to, friends to meet, or a part time job, community users may stay on computers for hours on end, and this is somewhat disheartening when students with legitimate needs are searching for a computer." (page 42)

• As a student this would be a huge concern to me. I believe Lied Library met this challenge well with the provisions and restrictions detailed in the following pages. 

A Few Thoughts on the Google Books Library Project

"Google's initiative will not make books obsolete; it will make the information in them more widely available." 

• I believe that this is the major concern with ebooks in general. While I personally purchase, read and enjoy ebooks, I have always feared that widespread availability of digital literature would make my beloved paper books disappear. For me, I have distinctly different feelings about publishing novels and publishing academic literature in ebook format. I personally love accessing academic literature digitally and want to access it remotely whenever possible; however, I feel very differently about novels and the like. I will be paying close attention to my feelings on this topic as I learn more about ebooks and the future of print.

"This and other digitization endeavors will preserve and perpetuate the ideas of thousands of authors by transferring them to today's technology."

• Smith’s idea that digitization “makes the past accessible” makes a lot of sense to me. I can definitely see the benefit of making/circulating older texts in ebook format. 

"We all realize, at some unconscious level, that society is changing apace. No matter how unwieldy or even frustrating using a search engine sometimes can be, simply because of the mass of information it accesses, I suspect we all still marvel occasionally at how this technology has changed our lives."

• I don’t know if I agree that we “marvel” at it anymore; I think we expect information to be delivered to us within seconds because of search engines like Google. I think we’ve internalized the ease with which we can access anything and our expectations of information retrieval have changed dramatically. 

"Now, Google is liberating multiple books from our major research libraries and providing them not only to students across the country but across the world."

• What effect will this have on major research libraries?

"If they can't obtain something via the keyboard, it might as well not exist. In the world of information and ideas, authors' efforts to compose their life's work should not be irrelevant simply because they wrote and published in the "wrong" format."

• Here Smith poses an interesting argument in favor of ebooks. If ebooks are merely a response to the demands of users, why is there such a debate about the issue? (I’m not saying I agree, but Smith makes a good point.)

"The book, like ancient and medieval manuscripts, will continue to be a pathway for the transmission of knowledge. It is, after all, the ideas that are essential, and while many of us will never lose our love of paper books, the wonderful stuff inside them should survive for generations to come. Otherwise, collected human knowledge will be partial, mutated, and far too recent."

• While I agree that the ideas are what is essential, if we fully buy into this idea, what will become of libraries in the physical sense? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately and would love to hear more perspectives.