Assignment 2: My Digital Image Library (and a question)

Evolution of Bumblebee

Link

Question: Is it strictly necessary to resize all the images twice? Picasa seems to do a lovely job of that all by itself. I'll do it if need be (I'm well versed in the use of GIMP, the open-source Photoshop alternative) but it does seem a little superfluous. Please let me know ASAP via e-mail (spekkiomofw (at) gmail dot com).

Class notes - week 4

RE: Assignment 2: Yes, 3D objects OK. Picasa OK.
RE: Term project: ContentDM is OK if OK with group.

BUBL Catalogue of Internet Resources

Scorpion

The Scorpion Open Source project offers software that implements a system for automatically classifying Web-accessible text documents. Scorpion is intended for use by investigators who have a machine-readable subject classification scheme or thesaurus and wish to incorporate it into an automatic classification system.

CyberStacks

CyberStacks(sm) is a centralized, integrated, and unified collection of significant World Wide Web (WWW) and other Internet resources categorized using the Library of Congress classification scheme. Resources are organized under one or more relevant Library of Congress class numbers and an associated publication format and subject description. The majority of resources incorporated within its collection are monographic or serial works, files, databases or search services. All of the selected resources in CyberStacks(sm) are full-text, hypertext, or, hypermedia, and of a research or scholarly nature.

Dublin Core

Using Dublin Core: The Elements

Mountain West Digital Library - a DL that uses Dublin Core

MODS - a derivative of MARC21 using XML - uses syntax instead of numbers

MARC to Dublin Core Crosswalk

Social Bookmarking in Plain English video

DCMI Social Tagging Community

Arr! Another muddy point about assignment 2!

Avast! Another question about assignment 2!
(It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

The objects that we photograph or scan - must they be two-dimensional objects (i.e. papers, still images) or is three-dimensional acceptable as well?

Muddy points for week three

Today's lecture / presentation left me with a lot of questions that I decided to reserve for this post because I was afraid I'd end up taking up too much time.

Oh yeah, and by the way, terribly sorry about being late to class.

Image formats
Something I've run into that I want to know more about is JPEG 2000. It's not the same as the old JPEG standard. I think, if memory serves, that JPEG 2000 is used by the Pitt ULS for storing preservation masters instead of TIFF because it's capable of lossless compression. (I think.)

Something else: GIF handles simple animations; PNG does not. I don't know how relevant that is to the course, but....

Sound formats
First of all, on audio quality, I thought that CD-quality audio is 44.1 kHz, not 22 kHz. Then again, the Wikipedia article I linked says something about a 22.05 kHz Nyquist frequency and I have no idea what they're talking about. If someone could help me with this I'd appreciate it. I know it isn't terribly relevant to the class, but it's going to bug me.

Second, the only audio format we talked about was the infamous MP3. But it seems to me that MP3 is on its way out - largely because of its lack of support for Digital Rights Management, but also because better formats are now available. AAC files are smaller and better than MP3. There's also Microsoft's WMA, RealAudio, and the lesser-known Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.

Identifying digital objects

I'm really unclear on this - PURL and DOI sound more like address forwarding than identifiers. From the lecture it sounded like those services would just make sure that people could always find the items at their original location. (Valuable, but not all that an identifier does.) In my online travels I've seen use of MD5 checksums used as an identifier of sorts - if they match, it's the same item. I don't know - maybe I'm overthinking it.

Assignment 2

Just one minor thing here: do we have to use flickr? If we already have accounts with another image-sharing service, like Google Picasa (which conveniently integrates with Google Blogger) would that be acceptable too?