Reading Notes for 11/29/2010

1)      John Blossom (2009). What makes social media tick: seven secrets of social media. Content Nation, chapter 2. Wiley Publishing Inc. http://www.contentnation.com/wiki/chapter-2-what-makes-social-media-tick-seven-secrets-of-social-media

This article takes an in depth look at various functions of social media such as the role of Weblogs in both library and personal settings. I like how the author points out a key feature of Weblogs being the archival tools in which many blogs have. This class has actually afforded me my first opportunity to work within a blog setting, and I am finding the archiving feature to be of great value.  It has even been useful to me outside of this class. For instance, if I am in another class and they make mention of a topic that has been discussed in this specific class, all I have to do is enter into my blog and search my archive. Once I find the articles dealing with this subject, I then am brought to the particular entry where my notes and the exact articles I read dealing with this subject are stored, which is much more efficient than having to haphazardly skim a bunch of papers. This article also mentions, and I had not thought of this possibility until now, the benefits that blogging can have in a group project setting. I don't know how many times I have, during group projects; I have run into the problem of e-mail organization. Blogging seems like a much more efficient alternative. I also like the idea presented in this article regarding establishing a "reference blog" for those that may be working reference in a library. It may be a very viable alternative to the old reference binder. In addition, I think this article did a good job in relaying the opinion that librarians need to acquainted with the technicalities of blog creation in order to assist patrons who may benefit from the establishment of one. 

Charles Allan, “Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons, C&RL News, April 2007 Vol. 68, No. 4 http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2007/april07/usingawiki.cfm

This article also points out the increased benefits for librarians in using social software applications. In this particular article the benefits of creating a Wiki are discussed in order to affect more efficient communication processes in the realm of library instruction. It was interesting to learn that many companies actually offer Wikis (I had thought that this specific social software was only available via Wikipedia). Basically, a wiki works by establishing a list of users (via their e-mail address) who have rights to contribute to the material within said Wiki. Unfortunately, I have had no experience with using Wikis in the past, but this article definitely provides great incentive to get familiar with them in the future especially within a library setting.   

2)      Xan Arch, “Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution” C&RL News, February 2007 Vol. 68, No. 2 http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2007/february07/libraryfolksonomy.cfm

This article provides an overview of the benefits of social tagging or “folksonomy”. Then the article further outlines how social bookmarking sites such as Delicious.com can make the life for World Wide Web frequent users so much easier. I also learned about Delicious.com from this class which very much helped me organize the sites I find interesting or worth bookmarking. This article explains another benefit of social tagging being, through the creation of additional subject access by users to library materials. The article explains that this system can be largely fruitful for those users who are unfamiliar with controlled vocabularies and so these user supplied folksonomies will allow other users to retrieve information available in their fields easily. Also the use of social tagging in a library setting can be a way for librarians to point out good information resources that are available on the web. The article then states, that this would assist library patrons with the task of searching and bookmarking websites from the World Wide Web. 

3)      Jimmy Wales: “How a ragtag band created Wikipedia” http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia.html

I had previously understood how certain aspects of Wikipedia worked, but this video further explained to me how decisions are made about what entries should be included. I learned that this is done via the vote’s page which was actually new to me, and how votes and discussions among volunteer editors makes the process about which entry can be determined to be significant enough to make its way into Wikipedia. I also learned at the end of this video about how Wales discussed the creation of socially generated textbooks, and this idea sounds interesting.

Reading Notes for 11/22/2010

David Hawking , Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2 IEEE Computer, June 2006.

    This information is vital in understanding how to tackle various threats to the PC.  As librarians, I was wondering if there is anything that we can do more than a simple virus scan.  What else we can do as information professionals in order to contribute to the war on various Trojans? 

2) Shreeves, S. L., Habing, T. O., Hagedorn, K., & Young, J. A. (2005). Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting. Library Trends, 53(4), 576-589: http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/609/Shreeves_CurrentFutureTrends.pdf?sequence=2; 

I learned from this article how OAI-PMH will allow users to search many catalogs and repositories simultaneously. However, the different metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies used in the harvested catalogs and repositories could be the main barrier.  However, the expansions made on OAI-PMH gives a new hope for overcoming these barriers using a consistent approach. 

3) MICHAEL K. BERGMAN. “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/bergman.html
 
      I learned from this article how much we are missing out when we conduct our searches via Google.  That’s why librarians should further understand and implement Deep Web, such as searching electronic resources for patrons. However, I think that Google Scholar somewhat allows librarians and users to search the web as well as scholarly electronic resources in the same time. But still the user needs access to these electronic resources via library account as these resources needs subscription fees to be accessed.

Comments for 11/15/2010

http://archivist-amy-in-training.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-9-muddiest-point.html#comments

Reading Notes for 11/15/2010

1)      Mischo, W. (July/August 2005).  Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/mischo/07mischo.html

The above article explores different research projects on the development of “Federated Search”. It outlines that developing federated search is important to facilitate finding distributed information from different digital resources. It also outlines briefly on the history of developing “federated searching” through different projects and methodologies such as full-text repositories maintained by commercial and professional society publishers; preprint servers and Open Archive Initiative (OAI) provider sites; specialized Abstracting and Indexing (A & I) services; publisher and vendor vertical portals; local, regional, and national online catalogs; Web search and metasearch engines; local e-resource registries and digital content databases; campus institutional repository systems; and learning management systems.

2)      Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005).  Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/paepcke/07paepcke.html

The above article highlights the National Science Foundation project named the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI), which took place in 1994. It discusses and contrasts the point of view of both librarians and computer scientists about the development of digital libraries. It also outlines both the librarians’ views and computer scientists’ views about how the data should be organized and retrieved in digital environments. While the librarians prefer the traditional ways of collection development and using metadata in organization and retrieval, the computer scientists prefer developing algorithms for searching and retrieval without using the collection development methods. These two points of views were also affected by the advent of the World Wide Web at that time. The article concluded that there should be no conflict between the two views of librarians and computer scientists and that the librarians should utilize this new technological environment for better presenting their traditional services.

3)      Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/br226ir.pdf

The above article illustrates the nature and functions of institutional repositories and their role in transforming scholarship. It starts by defining the Institutional Repositories as a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.

Then it outlines the operational responsibility for these services which represents collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers.

A fully realized institutional repository will contain the following:

·         The intellectual works of faculty and students--both research and teaching materials

·         Documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution

·         Experimental and observational data captured by members of the institution that support their scholarly activities

The author distinguishes between institutional repositories and scholarly publishing that the institutional repository which he proposes does not call for a new scholarly publishing role for universities, but it calls for institutional repositories as a mean of dissemination of scholarly communication. Institutional repositories can maintain data in addition to authored scholarly works. In this sense, the institutional repository is a complement and a supplement, rather than a substitute, for traditional scholarly publication venues.

The Strategic Importance of Institutional Repositories

The author summarizes the strategic importance of institutional repositories as “Institutional repositories can facilitate greatly enhanced access to traditional scholarly content by empowering faculty to effectively use the new dissemination capabilities offered by the network. This is also occurring on a disciplinary basis through the development of e-print and preprint servers, at least in some disciplines. In cases where the disciplinary practice is ready, institutional repositories can feed disciplinary repositories directly. In

cases where the disciplinary culture is more conservative, where scholarly societies or key journals choose to hold back change, institutional repositories can help individual faculty take the lead in initiating shifts in disciplinary practice.”

Cautions about Institutional Repositories

The author outlines the following three cautions about institutional repositories:

·         The first potential danger is that institutional repositories are cast as tools of institutional (administrative) strategies to exercise control over what has typically been faculty controlled intellectual work. I believe that any institutional repository approach that requires deposit of faculty or student works and/or uses the institutional repository as a means of asserting control or ownership over these works will likely fail, and probably deserves to fail.

·         The use of complex, cumbersome "gate keeping" policies for admitting materials to institutional repositories--particularly those that emulate practices from traditional scholarly publication such as the use of peer reviewers--are highly counterproductive; this will prevent institutional repositories from supporting and empowering faculty innovators and leaders.

·         An institutional repository can fail over time for many reasons: policy (for example, the institution chooses to stop funding it), management failure or incompetence, or technical problems. Any of these failures can result in the disruption of access, or worse, total and permanent loss of material stored in the institutional repository.

Institutional Repositories and Networked Information Standards and Infrastructure

The author outlines the main features of the institutional repositories and networked information standards and infrastructure as Preservable Formats which are the file formats that will be preserved in accessible forms (presumably through format migration, Identifiers which are persistent reference to materials in institutional repositories, Rights Documentation and Management which include technical part involving metadata structures; the other part is building consensus around a relatively small number of sets of terms and conditions that can cover the majority of the materials in practice. Working "standards" like the stock licenses under development by Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ can be used in rights documentation and management.

Future Developments in Institutional Repositories

Finally, the author outlines the future developments in institutional repositories as “There is a clearly evolving idea of "federating" institutional repositories but as yet little concrete exploration of what this means--cross-repository search, swaps of storage between institutional repositories to gain geographic and systems diversity in pursuit of backup, preservation, and disaster recovery, or other capabilities. This will be a fruitful area for exploration and innovation. Another part of federation is that faculty often don't stay at a single institution for their entire career, and they frequently disregard institutional boundaries when collaborating with other scholars. Federation of institutional repositories may also subsume the development of arrangements that recognize and facilitate faculty mobility and cross-institutional collaborations.”

Muddiest points for 11/8

While working with XML; what is the difference between DTD and XSL?

Assignment 5 (Koha List)

http://upitt01-staff.kwc.kohalibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/virtualshelves/shelves.pl

User Name: IAW5
Password: IAW5

List Names:
Egyptology
History of Egypt
History of Ancient Egypt
Nile River
Underwater Archaeology (Alexandria, Egypt)

11/8/2010 Comments

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Reading notes 11/8/2010 XML

1)      Martin Bryan.  Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)

http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/internet/web/xmlintro.htm

The above tutorial is not available as the BURKS project was ceased.

“BURKS (the Brighton University Resource Kit for Students) was a non-profit collection of useful resources for students of Computing who did not have (or could not afford) an Internet connection. The resources include compilers, tutorials and reference manuals for dozens of different programming languages, a dictionary of computing with over 13,000 entries, a copy of the Mandrake 8.0 Linux distribution, a vast amount of useful software, information about the Internet itself, and much more. The entire collection was also available online.
The BURKS project ran from 1997 to 2001 and the collection grew from about 450M in the 1997 edition to about 2.5G in the 2001 edition. New editions were prepared every August in readiness for the start of the UK academic year. Eventually sales dropped as broadband Internet access and cheap CD and DVD writers became more common, and the project was closed down as a result.”

2)      Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand1.html

The above article provides a guide to XML standards, including a wide range of recommended resources for further information about all aspects of using XML standards.

3)      Extending you Markup: a XML tutorial by Andre Bergholz

http://www.computer.org/internet/xml/xml.tutorial.pdf

I didn’t locate article 3 from the above link but located it through the link below:

http://xml.coverpages.org/BergholzTutorial.pdf

Article 3 is short tutorial that presents the essential concepts of XML, and how XML is important for presentation, exchange, and management of information

4)      XML Schema Tutorial

http://www.w3schools.com/Schema/default.asp

The above tutorial explains how to create XML Schemas, why XML Schemas are more powerful than DTDs, and how to use XML Schema in applications.

Muddiest Points for 11/1/2010

I was wondering if anyone can use Web page authoring software or HTML to modify existing Web pages. Or there are permissions for doing this.