Friday, October 17, 2008

Readings for Week Eight

First: no muddy points.

1. Chapter 1. Definition and Origins of OAI-PMH. oai-pmh-ch1.pdf

OAI-PMH sounds a lot better than Z39.50. XML? Simple? I'm in.

2. Miller, Todd. "Federated Searching: Put It in Its Place." Library Journal April 15, 2004. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA406012.html&


It seems to me that the author is arguing that federated search, not the library catalog, should be the new "center" of library searching. I think it's fair to say that at least some libraries have taken that to heart - Pitt's ULS has its "Zoom!" on its homepage, while PITTCat (aside: why is PITT capitalized in PITTCat?) requires additional clicking.

3. Hane, Paula J. "The Truth About Federated Searching." Information Today Vol. 20 No. 10, November/December 2003.
http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct03/hane1.shtml


This article would be better titled "The Sad Truth About Federated Searching." It's surprising to me that this list of five weaknesses of federated searching were provided by WebFeat, a provider of...federated searching. I guess one has to give them points for candor. It's still...disheartening, I guess.

4. Lynch, Clifford A. (1997). "The Z39.50 Information Retrieval Standard, Part 1: A Strategic View of its Past, Present, and Future." D-Lib Magazine, April 1997. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april97/04lynch.html

Wow...this article is rather old by technology standards, isn't it? It's over ten years old - ten years generally considered the threshold between "new" and "old" scholarship. I'm curious if this is still "current," though I do get the gist of it.

5. Norbert Lossau, “Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet.” D-Lib Magazine, June 2004, Volume 10 Number 6.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/lossau/06lossau.html


"Will Google, Yahoo or Microsoft be the only portals to global knowledge in 2010?"

Actually, the true portal to global knowledge is John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise, the authoritative almanac to complete world knowledge, first published in 2005. Its continuation, More Information than You Require, is being released on 21 October 2008.

That said, I find it interesting that the author clearly notes the strong conservatism in librarianship, but then says that their conclusions are "obvious." And this article is four years old - and I don't know that much has changed in that time, at least from what I've seen.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Term project links

Digital library software:
Articles re: digital library software

Class notes 14OCT08

  • Midterm is 03NOV08 (I've already registered with DRS)
  • First presentation about digital library project is also 03NOV08; ~5 minutes
Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL)

Friday, October 10, 2008

Week 7 reading reactions

Hawking, David. "How Things Work: Web Search Engines: Part 1." Computer June 2006, Link
Given my computer science background, I don't see many surprises here, but it's still very interesting reading. The amount of power and equipment needed to do this is always surprising, though - just as a matter of magnitude.
Hawking, David. "How Things Work: Web Search Engines: Part 2." Computer August 2006, Link
The mathematics here make my head spin and make me glad that I'm not a programmer. That said, it seems unfortunate to me that this is the end of this series on search engines - assuming, of course, that it is.

Henzinger, Monika R., Rajeev Motwani, and Craig Silverstein. "Challenges in Web Search Engines." ACM SIGIR Forum Vol 36 No 2, Fall 2002,
Link

This article is strictly about under-researched search engine problems: spam, content quality, quality evaluation, web conventions (i.e. standard practices), duplicate hosts, and vaguely-structured data. Essentially, what I get out of this article is that the web is still rather chaotic, so search engines aren't easy.