Assignment 6

http://www.pitt.edu/~wog1/index.html

My Final Blog and Muddy Point.

I think is the last one I need to have the required amount. It's been a wild ride. Haha...

Anyway, I'd like to write for a bit about the usefulness of the wiki as a library tool. The greatest asset of the wiki is also its greatest downfall. The wiki depends upon people to actually update it. If no one uses a wiki, it becomes a worthless resource and can actually lead to more problems than might have occurred in its absence. Once a library sets out to use a wiki as a method of recording and providing information either in terms of merely its own employees or to the patrons, it can lead to everyone assuming that someone else will be the one who updates it. This is based on personal experience. Using a wiki without having a clear schedule of people responsible for updating it with regularity, can lead to a situation in which changes to library policy have not been tracked or recorded...or at least not on the wiki. This can lead to employees consulting an out of date document and lead to the inadvertent violation of library policy.

I find the idea of introducing social tagging into the library environment to be intriguing. I think that it should be used as a method of bolstering the preexisting library cataloging system and associated metadata. Barring any issues of intentional abuse, this could greatly improve search and retrieval ability and provide patrons with higher quality service.

Muddy Point: I have no muddy point. It's all clear skies this week!

Assignment 5 KOHA

My user name is WOG1 and the list is called "Assignment 5 - Will Gray".

http://jade.exp.sis.pitt.edu:8080/cgi-bin/koha/virtualshelves/shelves.pl?viewshelf=66

Week 12 Blog Post and Muddy Point

The surface web consists of sites that have been indexed by spider crawling automated programs that seek out sites that are static and linked to multiple other pages. This is the portion of the Internet that most of us are familiar with but there is another portion of the web called the 'Deep Web' that is difficult to measure because it can only be searched and retrieved by entering the precisely correct query into an engine. Much of the Internet falls into the category of "Deep Web". BrightPlanet is an engine developed to be capable of running multiple simultaneous searches in an attempt to make deep web content quantifiable and accessible. It found that the deep web is 2,000 times larger than the world wide web that most of us are familiar with. Deep web sites are more frequently used than surface sites but are less well known. I don't understand how that makes sense. Even Google is only searching through 1 in every 3,000 pages available. It's amazing to think how much more access and accurate retrieval of information we could have with even 50% efficiency. Considering how convenient and available information seems now, it's exciting to imagine a world in which information could be hundreds of times more retrievable. I have to admit that I never imagined that there was still that much untapped potential even with the current generation of technology. Given the speed that storage and transmission technologies advance, I wonder how likely it is that searching and retrieval will ever come close to bridging the gap of this vast unused potential.

Muddy Point: No Muddy Point from last week's stuff.

Week 11 Blog and Muddy Point

1993-1994:
The National Science Foundation held planning workshops on digital libraries.

1994:
Digital library research gains its first Federal funding under the Digital Library Initiative DL1. It consisted of 6 projects funded jointly by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency:

1. University of Michigan: Research into improving secondary education through the use of agent technologies.
2. Stanford University: Research on digital library interoperability.
3. University of California-Berkeley: Research on imaging and database technologies.
4. University of California-Santa Barbara: Alexandria Project to develop Geographical Information Systems.
5. Carnegie Mellon University: Research into integrated audio, video, and language recognition software.
6. University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne: Developing protocols for full-text journals.

1998: The DL2 program began. It was funded jointly by the NSF, NASA, DARPA, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, the FBI, and the National Endowment for Humanities.

DL1 and DL2 received $68 million in Federal money between 1994 and 1999.

Google grew out of technologies developed at Stanford's DL1 research.

The creation of digital libraries merged the fields of Library Science and Computer science into what would eventually become the field we study today: Information Science.

Muddy Point: Dr. He did a great job of clarifying my confusion about XML in lecture last week. No Muddy Point.

Assignment 4

http://www.citeulike.org/user/SenileZebra

Week 10

XML is a variant of SGML, or Standardized markup language. I'm not certain if I'm quite understanding it correctly, but I'll try to explain what I think it does. XML facilitates the transmission of data online. It can use DTD's(document type definitions) to ensure that there are no errors in the document formatting. However, XML does not have to use DTD's. It can assign a kind of default DTD of its own to components of a document that have not been labeled. I'm not really sure what that means at all. Does that mean it just tags it as unlabeled, or does it have the ability to discern to some extent what part of a document something was meant to be? I'm very confused about this. It seems to be saying that XML is not a markup language but that it is a formal language that can break down components of a document into different elements based on certain logical queues. I don't understand how that's different from HTML coding that breaks a document up into headings and paragraphs. It might be that XML is just far more specific and has a wider variety of elements. I think I'm going to be relying a lot on Dr. He's lecture to help me to understand this. I'm really not seeing what the difference between XML and other languages that we've looked at is. The readings seem to be saying that XML helps to link digital documents together and to define them in a more detailed manner but I don't understand how or what it means. I may end up with quite a few Muddy Points after class this Thursday.

Muddy Point: No muddy point from last week. Dr. He did a great job of explaining CSS. Hopefully, XML will make much more sense after this coming week's lecture as well.

Week 9

I have never used CSS before at all. I do not really understand it. It seems like the idea is that it changes the way what you have written in HTML is displayed on the final web document. This saves time and space when coding in HTML because the CSS coding eliminates the need to do some of the style and font changes in the HTML itself. CSS sheets are a list of rules that describe how HTML should format and display content on a webpage for various circumstances. The way I understand it, it would enable you to say something like "all text in a paragraph that is above a certain font size should be bold and red." Then you wouldn't have to code the text as bold and red for every sized 20 font phrase in a document because the CSS would do that work for you.

As with the HTML tutorials last week, the CSS tutorials will be useful to look back to when actually using CSS but aren't really hugely helpful now aside from helping me(hopefully) to correctly understand what exactly CSS does. I have trouble understanding what the tutorials are getting at sometimes but class last week clarified all of my HTML questions, so I'm assuming that this will most likely also be the case with regards to CSS.


Muddy Point: No muddy point from last week's class :)

Week 8

The HTML tutorial and cheat sheet provide a quick introduction to some HTML functions. The cheat sheet should prove useful. I haven't really ever done very much with HTML personally. I've used very basic tags before on forums and blogs to change text font or italicize something but only really small things like that.

The other article seems to be saying that a Content Management System or CMS allows users who are less familiar with HTML to create content through use of and HTML editing program. I'm not certain that I'm understanding everything that the article is trying to say, but I'm sure that it will be clarified in class.


Muddiest Point: I have no Muddiest Point from what we went over last week.

Week 7

The Internet is a network of smaller networks. It is a massive group of corporate networks which have agreed to work together through Network Access Points(NAP's). A Point of Presence(POP) is a place for local users to access a network. Those networks are interconnected through NAP's. Routers facilitate the transfer of data traffic over network lines and ensure both that the system does not become clogged with data and that the data reaches its intended destination. Huge fiber optic lines called backbones are used to link the larger networks together. The first backbone, called NSFNET, was created in 1987. IP addresses are used to identify computers on the various interconnected networks that make up the Internet. The four numbers in an IP address are called octets because they require 8 digits to be expressed in binary. These octets are categorized as Net or Host. the Net octets identify what network a computer belongs to and the Host octets identify the specific computer.

Muddiest Point: I am not certain that I fully understand what a dynamic IP protocol is.

Week 6

Local Area Network(LAN) - interconnects computers in a limited area(home, school, a particular building, etc.).

• Higher data transfer rates than Wide Area Networks(WAN).
• Smaller area of operation than WANs.
• No need to lease telecommunications lines.
• Ethernet and WiFi are the two most common LAN technologies currently in use.
• Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1975.

Computer Networks - computers connected by channels that allow the sharing of resources.

• Classified according to the medium used for data transport, scale of the network, and type of communications protocol.
• Scale: WAN or LAN
• Wired technologies:

1. Twisted Pair Wiring - Ethernet fits into this category. It is the most common variety of wired networking technology. It has a transmission speed of between 2 million bits per second(bps) and 10 billion bps.
2. Coaxial Cable - It is used for cable television. It has a transmission speed of 200 to 500 million bps.
3. Optical Fiber - It has a transmission speed of trillions of bps.

• Wireless Technologies:

1. Terrestrial Microwave: Earth-based transmitters and receivers that look like satellite dishes.
2. Wireless LAN: what most people have at home

RFID(Radio Frequency Identifier) - similar to a bar code but it does not have to be visible in order to be read and it can carry far more data.

• Used in access "swipe" cards
• Many privacy issues due to increased read range and information capacity.

MUDDIEST POINT: No muddiest point this week.

Jing-le All The Way

 See what I did there?

My Jing Video

First Jing Capture

Second Jing Capture

Third Jing Capture

Fourth Jing Capture

Fifth Jing Capture

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 Images

If you don't mind, could you post a comment on this entry just so I know that you can see my blog. I just realized that it says I don't have any followers and I want to be sure that you are actually seeing my entries. I'd hate to find out that I hadn't gotten credit for something because the link to my blog was broken for some reason. Thanks!

Week 4

A database is an organized collection of data. There must be a certain degree of quality to that organization for something to be considered a database. Databases use a variety of DBMS's(Database Management Systems). The term 'database' refers to the data and data structures themselves while the software managing those structures is what is referred to as the DBMS. The most standard database language is SQL.

The first databases were navigational models. That means that they accessed data by 'following pointers from one record to another'. Today's databases are predominantly of the relational model which focuses on searchability. 

Muddiest Point: I do not understand what an 'entity relationship model' and a 'query' language are. I also don't feel like I really understood what the navigational model was. I feel like it is likely that next week's lecture will clarify most of this. I've used MS Excel a little before but I do not have much experience working with database management programs which is probably why I'm not as familiar with some of what this week's reading was trying to explain.

Week 3

1. Data Compression.
      Encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use.

• Helps conserve hard disc space and bandwidth.
• Lossless Data Compression uses statistical redundancy to preserve data without error.
• Lossy Data Compression is used when some data loss is acceptable(jpeg images among other things).

2. Youtube and Libraries.

• Youtube has many potential applications for distance learning and communicating with patrons in general.
• Possible uses include instructional videos that would let users know where and how to locate and use the library's resources.
• It could also be used to inform patrons of changes to the collection and newly acquired items.
• By subscribing to the Library Channel's RSS feed, it would be easy for users to see any new updates as they are released.
• The maximum file size that can be uploaded is 100 megabytes and the maximum video length is 10 minutes.

3. Imaging Pittsburgh

• The article on First Monday detailed a project to allow access to images from the University of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.
• There should be up to 10,000 images available by the end of the project.
• Having these images digitized and available from one website will allow greater ease of access and will simplify the task of searching through these collections.

Muddiest Point: I felt like the readings this week were pretty straight forward and I do not really have any questions about them at this point. I did notice as I reviewed my notes from last week that I had written down the term "solid state hard drive" but did not have any further definition. I suppose if I had to list one thing that I would not mind some clarification on, it would be that.