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.