Unit 12: My comments elsewhere

Commented on a colleague's blog

Commented on a colleague's blog

Unit 12: Reading notes

Reichardt, R., & Harder, G. (2005). Weblogs: their use and application in science and technology libraries. Science & Technology Libraries, 25(3), 105-116.

• Written by an engineering librarian and a biological/computing sciencs librarian- interesting perspectives
• Good background on the history of blogs
• Applications in science and technology libraries: managing teams and projects, reference desk blogging, student blogging, current awareness
• "The challenge for librarians is to become familiar with the weblog and its potential, and explore new ways to further its development and application in science and technology librarianship." Good point - I wonder how much this has changed since this article was written in 2004.

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.

• Wiki - multi-author, collaborative software
• "A library instruction wiki can create better information sharing, facilitate collaboration in the creation of resources, and efficiently divide work loads among librarians."
• Library instruction wikis can be used to share knowledge between librarians as well as allow them to work collaboratively to create training materials.

Xan Arch, "Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution." C&RL News, February 2007 Vol. 68, No. 2.

• Social tagging - allows users to create bookmarks (or “tags”) for Web sites and save them online. Tags are usually subject keywords. These tags become a folksonomy. Del.icio.us is a popular site.
• "The library is meant for discovery of information, through the catalog, through the reference librarian, through browsing a shelf. This discovery often stalls at the Internet because it is frustratingly uncatalogable. But still many students turn to the Internet as a resource, without guidance and without a critical eye. What if the library could provide an index to quality Internet resources, created by the librarians at the institution?"
• PennTags (tags.library.upenn.edu) - University of Pennsylvania site that allows students and faculty to create folksonomies

Jimmy Wales: "How a ragtag band created Wikipedia"

• 2005 numbers: over 600,000 articles in English, 2 million articles across all languages.
  
• I looked up current numbers on Wikipedia - as of today, there are 2.6 million articles in English, and more than 10 million articles in more than 250 languages.
  
• Neutral point of view policy - social cooperation
• "The majority view is not necessarily neutral"

Unit 11: Muddiest point

I'm still confused about the definition of ontology. Are there some other examples?

Assignment 6: My website

My Website

Here's my website, created with the help of iWeb. I was glad that we could use a website editor for this assignment - I feel like figuring out how to use the program was more beneficial than messing with the actual HTML.

Unit 10: My Comments elsewhere

Commented on a colleague's blog

Commented on a colleague's blog

Unit 10: Reading notes

David Hawking, Web Search Engines: Part I and II, IEEE Computer, June 2006

• Interesting point - today's search engines not only index many more sites, they provide "much higher quality" answers to queries.
• "For redundancy and fault tolerance, large search engines operate multiple, geographically distributed data centers"
• Crawling algorithms are used to search webpages in incredibly high numbers
  
• "If each HTTP request takes one second to complete—some will take much longer or fail to respond at all—the simple crawler can fetch no more than 86,400 pages per day. At this rate, it would take 634 years to crawl 20 billion pages. In practice, crawling is carried out using hundreds of distributed crawling machines." Wow.
  
• "Search engines use an inverted file to rapidly identify indexing terms—the documents that contain a particular word or phrase"

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.

• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) - means to federate access to diverse e-print archives through metadata harvesting
  
• OAI-PMH was initially designed to meet the needs of the e-print archives community - and could be applicable in a broad range of communities, including libraries, museums, and archives.
  

The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value by Michael K. Bergman

• "Searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean"
• Survey in 2000 concluded that public information on the deep Web was 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web - what about today?
  
• Deep Web documents are on average 27% smaller than surface Web documents
• Largest deep web site: National Climatic Data Center (NOAA)
• "These observations suggest a splitting within the Internet information search market: search directories that offer hand-picked information chosen from the surface Web to meet popular search needs; search engines for more robust surface-level searches; and server-side content-aggregation vertical "infohubs" for deep Web information to provide answers where comprehensiveness and quality are imperative."

Unit 9: Muddiest point

I'm intrigued by the idea of comments embedded within XML. Is it common to use this function? Is it something programmers and webpage authors actually use?