Muddiest Point Week 13

When going over the readings for this last week I saw the topic was cloud storage. Do you think that cloud storage has more benefits than negatives? It just seems a little too insecure and was wondering if you thought of it as a good option for storage.

Week 12 Notes

One of the readings for this week focused on using Instagram instead of Facebook for a library. The article discusses what Instagram is and how an academic library could benefit from having an Instagram account versus a Facebook account.

The article focused on how Instagram is geared towards today's younger diverse crowd and how they are on college campuses. I found it interesting that the overlap of Facebook users and Instagram users was relatively small for the academic library in the article. From my personal experience it seems that Facebook is the dominant social media provider and most of the libraries and archives I know of try to use Facebook as a way to promote their collections.

Using photos to interact with graduate students makes the library and archives seem interesting, and it makes sense for a library or an archives to have an Instagram account. If you want to see what your library, or archives, has then just look at their Instagram and find what they've posted. Posting photos is a gateway for students, it allows them to see what is out there, and then they come in to see and could even find their own interests within the library or archives.

Another way for the libraries and archives to get attention through web interaction is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a way for libraries to provide interaction with their collections, rather than just tell users what they have. Web 2.0 allows user to interact directly with collections, to converse. Advancements such as Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 provide a future for libraries in this digital age.

Muddiest Point Week 12

This week's muddiest point comes from the idea of using Instagram for a library. What other kinds of social media would libraries benefit from? Would a library benefit from having a Reddit page, or a Pinterest, or even a Tumblr? I think that there are so many social media sites that it doesn't really matter which one a library chooses to use, but to choose one, or does it matter?

Muddiest Point Week 11

This week's muddiest point comes from the article regarding the National Science Foundation. Because of the NSF's contribution to the digitization efforts do you think that if they didn't contribute, unlikely but what if, that the information fields would be set back in some ways? Or do you think that another field would have stepped up and taken the place of the NSF?

Week 11 Notes

The National Science Foundation's work on Digital Library Initiative gave way for the digital age that we know of today. Without the NSF's contribution, as well as Google's search engine, many fields would not have the types of digital presence that it has today. As a history undergraduate, I would not have had much success without the digitization, and publication, of works made available online.

The article that focused on university and institutional repositories caught my eye because of the responsibilities that an institution had to enable access to their documents. There are many people who depend on an institution's records that I failed to comprehend before this week's readings.

Muddiest Point Week 10

This week's muddiest point comes from the readings, if I know HTML and CSS what advantage is it to have XML? It seems like it would be unnecessary to know XML if it's not standardized like HTML is.

XML Notes

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and is a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

XML is a good language to use for structured documents that are shared over the internet. The role of elements in XML is Document Type Detail (DTD), which allows users to check that each component of document occurs in a valid place within the interchanged data stream. Users are able to check if they accidently put a third-level heading in a document before they entered a second-level heading, this is something that HTML can't do.

Some advantages of XML include:

• bring multiple files together to form compound documents
• identify where illustrations are to be incorporated into text files, and the format used to encode each illustration
• provide processing control information to supporting programs, such as document validators and browsers
• add editorial comments to a file.

There are some disadvantages to XML though, XML is not:

• a predefined set of tags, of the type defined for HTML, that can be used to markup documents
• a standardized template for producing particular types of documents.

One thing that I think is interesting about XML is that the language uses quotes within the code to determine the key figure of the code. An example of the quotes include:

<xs:sequence>
      <xs:element name="to" type="xs:string"/>
      <xs:element name="from" type="xs:string"/>
      <xs:element name="heading" type="xs:string"/>
      <xs:element name="body" type="xs:string"/>
    </xs:sequence>

The elements, "to, from, heading, and body"  are all in quotations to signal what the elements are in the document.

XML is an interesting markup language and seems like it would be a good language to learn for a job, but it seems like it would be unnecessary if a job requests me to write in HTML and use CSS.