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

Greenstone 3 notes

These are notes for myself....

"An error has occurred on the remote Greenstone server while performing this operation: Empty gliserver URL: please set this in Preferences before continuing."

"Unable to get the list of classifiers using classinfo.pl -listall"

Class notes 20OCT08

VirtualBox - open source system virtualization

CIRES: Content Based Image REtrieval System

Music Retrieval by Content Demo

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.

Term project links

Digital library software:

• DSpace
• EPrints
• Fedora
• Greenstone

Articles re: digital library software

• Some considerations when selecting digital library software
• Using Open Source Social Software as Digital Library Interface

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)