Reading Notes Week 5

This week's readings focused on the concept of metadata or "data about data." The reading regarding the Dublin Core Data Model was one that was interesting to me. It noted that it was not a complete study, but a work in progress because of the subject matter. Metadata, is something that is very complex and hard to make a standard for internationally, but that is exactly what the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is trying to do, create a standard for metadata. 

The outline that DCMI used to attempt to make this possible is:

Internationalization: make it descriptive enough for other languages to understand without much issues.

Modularization/Extensibility: make it adaptable for future uses and systems.

Element Identity: to ensure that there are no name-collisions.

Semantic Refinement: to order elements into more specific meaningful ways for researchers/users.

Identification of coding schemes: this allows to be known what each part of the code does what, ridding the database of ambiguity.

Specification of controlled vocabularies: this is for the many disciplines that have complex and diverse vocabularies.

Identification of structured compound values: important for metadata and those that have the authority of the databases.

Something else to note in this article is anything can be a resource and can be uniquely identified, properties are specific types of resources, classes of objects are specific types of resources, and literals are text resources. The last one was the one that interested me the most: "literals are text resources," simply a line of text nothing more to it. It might not be the most important, but it struck me as interesting.

Mendeley Article

I have downloaded Mendeley before this class for this program as instructed by Dr. Tomer and Dr. Mahoney. I didn't know exactly how it works and to think that Mendeley uses "scrobbling" technology to use my preferences to create a "playlist" for me. That is one of the coolest things 

in my opinion. This allows the database to find articles and other documents that I would find interesting and useful for a research paper. The fact that I can also share my findings is an added bonus to the system. Another thing that makes Mendeley helpful is the fact that the system can link to other programs like Zotero, which can be helpful for users new and uncomfortable or even users who can't find what they're looking for.

Muddiest Point 3

This week's lecture and lab seemed to be rather straightforward, but if I had to choose something to ask about for me detail; it is how does a database make the distinction between a primary key and foreign key? I know that there is a difference between what each does, but how does the computer know that the primary key is the one to go to, and not the foreign key for a task/job/whatever?

Muddiest Point 2

One thing that I would like cleared up is the slide that had "a 1024x768 image requires 2.4 MB" I'm just a little confused still how to get to 2.4 MB. I know multiplication is involved, but I'm just not sure how and what numbers got you there.

Database Notes

I thought it was really interesting how the link for the Database Normalization claimed to be too hard to use just words to describe the normalization process but the images and figures for the article did not load onto it. I went through the article hoping that they would be at the end, but they weren't.

The wikipedia article on the entity-relationship model was something that seemed familiar to me. The description of it is that every component of a business model has a relationship with each other component. When it mentioned data tables, used in just about all fields really, and explained how that is a entity-relationship model it clicked in my head. Another thing about that article is the use of the relationships and how they're represented in the database, it seems like a very intuitive way to have the model.

Another problem occurred when trying to access the database wikipedia article, a page from Blackboard appeared and stated that I did not have permission to access it. I went on to wikipedia myself and found it. It was a very technical article that was difficult to digest, but definitely showcased how important databases are to many different aspects of different careers. The best part of this article was that the terminology was defined at the beginning of it, made it a little bit easier to understand.

Data Compression and YouTube

              The Wikipedia article describing data compression, though tedious, was very informative regarding the ways data is compressed for our convenience. I had no idea that there audio file compression was so complicated regarding the necessity of speech encoding. When I read that speech encoding is important to enable the audio recorded to even be processed by the human ear, it made sense to me, but I had no idea how it was done or anything really.
               Lossy versus Lossless compression seemed very straightforward as well. One throws out data while the other doesn't. It seems to me that lossy compression is easier to use because it gets rid of the unnecessary data.

               The Webb article regarding YouTube is a nice read and has some good ideas that libraries and museums could do to expand their clientele.To put the collection out there and easy to use for the public is something that is essential for libraries, access. YouTube provides that easy access for libraries and even museums. The one thing that concerns me is that YouTube has since updated its policy settings and membership sign up since this article was published. It is a minor thing, but policy changes have caused many people to view YouTube as a hinderance in some cases that were not there when this article was published.

               The concept of digitization keeps coming up in our readings all over the different courses I am taking. I never really thought that YouTube would be a viable option. When I think of digitization, scanning books and photos come to mind, making videos is something that I just did not think of. It would be a great to use YouTube to digitize some things that a library has. If a library has a special collections and they put it on YouTube, just a quick "hey we have this" it would be a great way to get people into the library to see the special collection and even the collection as a whole. I hope that even with the policy changes made by Google and YouTube that projects like this are continued, either by YouTube or some other company.

Muddiest Post

Muddiest Point

One thing that seemed to interest me that wasn't very clear in our discussion was the amount of data storage available in this day and age. The slide displayed the different classes of contact units, but what wasn't clear was if there were any real uses of all that storage. Are there any places, companies, etc. that have used a Exabyte, Zettabyte, or a Yottabyte? What would they need that kind of storage for? A follow up to that is would an archives or museum be interested in having that kind of data storage for their digitization needs? Or would that be considered a waste of time and money?

Lied Library, Future Technology, and the Future of Digitizing

The Lied Library article was an interesting one that took many concerns and issues that libraries and archives face and explained how one library, Lied Library for the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, was able to cope with the ever expanding technologies.

More technologies and updates to the computers were among the most productive things that the library was able to do to help their library expand. Granted, this article is very dated, from 2005, the concept of expanding on existing and continuing technology is a concept that both archives and libraries struggle with today. This article was a glance at how one university library was able to not only keep up, but to strive in the conditions of an ever-advancing technological world.

The entire time of reading the article I kept thinking to myself, "what about how technology has advanced from the time this article was published?" While this article doesn't answer that question regarding current technology, but it does provide insight that the Lied Library would continue to advance with the technology for their patrons.



The two digitizing articles, specifically the one regarding the Google Books Project, is something that greatly interests me. As someone who watched Google and the World Brain, the idea of having Google digitize all the books is one that has both pros and cons. While digitizing books for academic use is indeed useful for studies, it was essential for my history undergraduate work, the idea of having books protected by copyright on the web for free "fair use" is something that is unsettling. The article makes a good point that if something isn't "accessible from the keyboard, it might as well not exist," a book, and an author is something that needs to exist. The content of books will still exist, regardless of technologies, but the creators need to be credited for their work, and with Google's project the authors were not getting compensated.

As someone who is entering the information technologies and sciences field, digitization is something that will be a cornerstone in the near future. How it will affect it is still to be determined. Whether it is authors and publishers fighting and winning against Google, or Google and other companies incorporating the technology so much that it is futile to resist, is yet to be seen (at least in my mind).

OCLC Notes

This article is a follow up of the previous report made by the OCLC in 2003

• Format agnostic - current consumer content mentality of not caring what type of medium information comes from
• Nowadays there are articles that have small bits of it available on a website or a PDF, but to view the whole article in its entirety, one has to purchase it "premium content"

• Growth of e-books and web pages was not always vastly expanding, it was once slowing
• Now traditional print publishing is slowing because of e-books being adopted more widely
• Technology is not the only challenge, social challenges are prevalent and change how content is created, collected, used, shared, and preserved
• Smartphones are one of the technologies 
• "The medium is the message" with the "change of scale" view is something that doesn't make sense in my mind. I view that statement as that the choice of medium states a message of its own.

• With the new technologies, email and other applications, they come equipped with distribution options: delivery, filtering, personalization, and convenience. This makes the idea of new technologies as "disruptive"
• Emails have grown exponentially over the years, roughly 22 billion emails (minus spam) sent daily in this age
• Young people are the ones who use this new technology a lot, as a direct form of entertainment
• New technologies are cheaper and easier for other countries to maintain than computers

Microtransactions seem to be a new thing in these technologies for information sciences. This is something that I hope isn't fully incorporated into the information technologies/libraries. They are a nuisance for the gaming community and I would hate to see the situation of "25 cents for this sentence? Why not."

Social publishing seems like it could be a good idea, but one that could easily be abused. When institutions are not involved in the process the author has their thoughts at the forefront and may not edit them in any shape or form. This could lead to some embarrassing moments on the internet that could offend people.

       I know that blogs and wikis have existed before, but there are a lot of bloggers and people who publish their own works on the internet that have made fools of themselves or offended a large group of people. I guess this is a "few versus the many" argument.

The survey that was posted in the article regarding blogs and their readership: what kind of blogs were they? Were they blogs about sports, technology, movies, etc.?

Some of the terms used by the article were familiar, but some were definitely new and interesting. An example: moblog, mobile blog, I had no idea what that was before this article. Interesting contraction to say the least.

"Print won't disappear anytime soon," a good concept, especially since archive students are learning that there are more paper documents in existence than ever before in Dr. Cox's class/book.

A survey found that teens who saw teens reading print newspapers were considered "nerdy" and the newspaper wants to consider other options? Is being "nerdy" still a negative stereotype in this day and age that newspapers are attempting to rid themselves of a stigma found in teenagers? Interesting.

Scholar/university publishing is threatened by online publishing as well, something that I did not think that would be that big of a problem. I guess smaller universities would be threatened, but not to the point where they would shut down.

The idea of universities using up so much time, energy, and money on platforms for electronic documents both inspires and fills me with skepticism. Inspiration because they are adopting the new wave of technology for their future students and patrons, but skepticism because these new technologies are going to be a cost on the university when they need to update them again, and again as technology upgrades constantly.