Week 12 reading reaction and muddiest point

Arms, William. "Implementing Policies for Access Management," D-Lib Magazine, February 1998.

So much of this seems obvious now, but this article is ten years old. It may well be that this influenced how systems work now.

Arms, William. "Chapter 6: Economic and legal issues," in Digital Libraries, MIT Press, 2000.

"Technology can contribute to the solutions, but it can not resolve economic or social issues."

Huh? Technology has done wonders for economic and social issues. Maybe this is a symptom of this being such an old text (relatively speaking) but even in 1999 people were recognizing the economic and social power of technology - particularly the Internet. The "dot-com bubble" was in full force in 1999!

Arms, William. "Chapter 7: Access management and security," in Digital Libraries, MIT Press, 2000.

"Data on many personal computers is unprotected except by physical access; anybody who has access to the computer can read the data."

I'm not sure about the accuracy of this. I know it's not true now - I'm not entirely sure it was true in 1999. It rather depends on the operating system, and there's also encryption. Anyway, I didn't learn anything new from this chapter.

Lesk, Michael. "Chapter 9: Economics" in Understanding Digital Libraries, 2005.

This, by far, is the most interesting of the readings for the week - it's the most current and the most relevant. It's very interesting that we haven't resolved these issues yet. And I don't have the answers, either.

Muddiest Point: None

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.

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).

Muddy points for week four: none.

I'm good this week.

Another muddy point re: term project

Is ContentDM considered open source software for the purposes of the term project? I'm going to be working with it for another course.

According to the ContentDM site, "While most users run the CONTENTdm software “out-of-the box,” it also has an API that allows for custom development. The open architecture supports extensions and the Web interface is fully customizable."

And if it isn't - could we use it instead of open source software? Believe me, I have nothing against open source software - my laptop runs on Ubuntu Linux, my browser of choice is Firefox, and I use GIMP on a semi-regular basis. But uniting the two assignments (working with ContentDM for LIS 2405, producing a prototype digital library for LIS 2670) would be very efficient.

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?