Week15 Reading Note

About the "Cloud Computing", the video clip is easier to understand the concept of clouding computing than Galen Gruman's various introduction to many definition of it. At the beginning of the digital era, an individual computer was independent  to utilize and store information, but this trend had changed due to the Internet. "Cluding Computing" is a technology which is more affordable and efficient for a general user. A user just needs a computer having an Internet connection to utilize an application to utilize certain without installing and storing software in an individual computer. Users are  connected to the service server through their  Internet,do their work with their work, and save their work at an application service provider's server. This technology could be realized thanks to the development of Web 2.0.

Thomas Frey's article about The Future of Libraries is very interesting to me. I deeply agree with him that libraries should be changed to survive in the digital technology but I do not agree with some of his suggestions. However, I post his 10 trends about the future library and add  my opinion at the end of a trend.

Trend #1 – Communication systems are continually changing the way people access information.

Books are a technology, and writing is also a technology, and every technology has a limited lifespan.

I agree with it but we should remember that system is a mere tool, not a goal.

Trend #2 – All technology ends. All technologies commonly used today will be replaced by something new.

That something else will be faster, smarter, cheaper, more capable, and more durable, work better, and look cooler than anything we have today. This is clear but we should seriously deliberate what kind of technology should be adopted into the library system.  

Trend #3 – We haven’t yet reached the ultimate small particle for storage. But soon.

The most critical component of stabilizing information storage will surround the issues of findability.

This is important fact because many libraries are spending tremendous fund for resource digitizing projects.

Trend #4 – Search Technology will become increasingly more complicated

As we achieve the ability to conduct more and more complicated searches, the role of the librarian to assist in finding this kind of information also becomes more and more important. People will not have the time and skills necessary to keep up on each new innovation in the search world, and they will need a competent professional to turn to.

Librarian should change their role from information keeper to information finder or seeker.

Trend #5 – Time compression is changing the lifestyle of library patrons

The spectrum of human need is continually expanding. The paradigm of “need” is changing, evolving, and most importantly, speeding up.

Trend #6 – Over time we will be transitioning to a verbal society

He also predicts that by 2050 literacy will be dead

I do not agree. I think that literacy continues with many reasons.

Trend #7 – The demand for global information is growing exponentially

Many secrets in tomorrow’s business world lie in the writings of people who did not speak English or any of the other prominent global languages.

Trend #8 – The Stage is being set for a new era of Global Systems

Trend #9 – We are transitioning from a product-based economy to an experience based economy

Books themselves will transition from a product to an experience. As books change in form from simple “words on a page” to various digital manifestations of the information, future books will be reviewed and evaluated by the experience they create

Because information is very accessible so patrons judge a library with their experience from its services, not quality of collection that it offers.

Trend #10 – Libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture

Week14 Reading Note

The issue of patrons' privacy has been buzzed for a long time. Collecting data about patrons' information seeking process is a controversial issue. From the view of data-mining, it is essential and vital to develop an effective and efficient method for the future information retrieval system. Yet, being watched, monitored, and collected by third party is not a pleasant experience for patrons. As Hammer sates, "respect for patron privacy is a fundamental value long recognized in the library code of ethics, and in federal and local legislation and case law". Moreover, after the September 11 attacks, the paradigm about an individual's privacy has been infringed without any second thought for the national security. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, released "Total Information Awareness" to track terrorists by monitoring individual's information access. Personally, I think that this is very dangerous attempts. If all information is aggregated into one system, it is very vulnerable to be invaded by hackers who have a bad intention.

Lab13

My WIKI page

http://liswiki.org/wiki/User:Miy26_lis2600

Week13 Reading Note

What makes social media tick: seven secrets of social media?

Blossom tries to explain about what is social media and its characteristics. It is easy to follow because his writing is easy and the content is already familiar to me. The most interesting point by his writing is that Digital technology is just a tool, not a center of social media, and it has been exist with different format such as publishing, broadcasting, and telephone.

In addition, I found a very interesting blog post. Here it is;

http://coolinsights.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-makes-social-media-producers-tick.html

Jimmy Wales: “How a ragtag band created Wikipedia”

• Neutral point of view policy: It is important because culturally very diverse communities work together to build up knowledge in Wikipedia
• Anonymous (18% of total users) remaining users are very closed communities.
• Open-ended

Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons

Wiki at the academic library can be used for sharing of knowledge and cooperating in creating resources for a library instruction class. Also it is every efficient because staffs can divide workloads without any difficulties. Also, by using Wikis, librarians learn more about the instruction of genral classes' needs, neglected "directions of the assignment, preferences of the professor that were not necessarily communicated previous to class time, and housekeeping issues, such as any broken Web links listed in a subject resource guide". It can be a "a centralized resource collaboration tool" between library staffs, faculties, and students.

Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution by Xan Arch

Social tagging : folksonomy(a taxonomy created by ordinary folks)

Social tagging is a relatively new phenomenon that allows an individual to create bookmarks (or “tags”) for Web sites and save them online.

1. You could store these bookmarks somewhere online.

2. You could access them anywhere.

3. You could see what other people are reading on your topic.

4. You could find new and unexpected directions for your research.

The benefits of social tagging

1. The library could provide an index to quality Internet resources, created by the librarians at the institution

2. The library could provide an index to quality Internet resources, created by the librarians at the institution. (Much valuable online information created by experts and scholars cannot be found easily.)

How to create

1. Choose the software

2. Find a niche in your library’s Web site

3. For creating content, start with subject specialist who can identify the best Web resrouces in their subject area

4. Tag them.

Problems

1. Spam tagging (spagging)

2. Appropriate keywords (controlled vocabulary)

Week12 Reading Note

This week’s reading is about how to indexing and aggregating information in the web. As you imagine, the data in the web is increasing exponentially and it is challenging for an information specialist to indexing and archiving those for future uses. Those articles show real attempts of this process and explain the algorithm behind these. In the Web Search Engines, David Hawking tries to explain how to index information through “the whole of the Web”. At the first part of the article, he reveals that the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN establish data centers as crawlers and collect data by them. And then, he describes issues which occur during the crawling process. They are related to the speed of crawling machine, crawler’s politeness while archiving information in a certain web site, and how to exclude and duplicate content. At the second part of the article, Hawking explains that indexing and query processing algorithm. Although the content of the article is strange and hard to understand but I can finally understand it thanks to the author’s clarification about terms in the process. OAI (open Archives Initiative) has developed standards for effective distribution of contents which is interoperable among diverse digital environment. Also, OAI offers the open access and its projects are extending to various fields.

Week11 Lab

Google Scholar

"Digital Library" AND ~Virtual Reference as topics

2008~2012 as a time span

Web of Knowledge

"Digital Library" AND ~Virtual Reference as topics

2008~2012 as a time span

Week11

This week’s reading materials are about digital library, especially with academic purpose.

I think that Mischo clearly express what is the problem and what is the goal of the digital library in his article published in 2005. He summarizes that “ information providers have designed enhanced gateway and navigation services on the interface side and also introduced federation mechanisms to assist users through the distributed, heterogeneous information environment” (Mischo,2005). Also, he introduces the history of DLI, the federal movement for developing effective tools for retrieval.

Next, I strongly agree with the opinion of the authors of Dewey Meets Turing. Since starting to study the Library Science, I have heard many complaints about roles of librarians in the digital era. Some say that there are invasion from other disciplines and machines, but we already have answers about the problems. According to Dewey Meets Turing, librarians should persist their unique and traditional roles such as resource organization, collation, and presentation, and the importance of a curating service is increasing dramatically.

Week10 Reading note comment

http://lis2600eh.blogspot.com/2012/03/week-10-reading-notes.html#comment-form

Week10 Reading Note

XML is an acronym of Extensible Markup language and is used for encoding information to machine readable formats. XML is usually compared with HTML, but they are clearly different purposes. HTML is for displaying content and XML is for encoding content itself. For example, in HTML environment, a machine can just display or represent ‘FORD’ with some specific font style and size according to the rule by established by HTML tag, but a machine can understand ‘FORD’ as an auto-maker thanks to the XML tag in the XML environment. This is significant because we need to co-relate information for better digital information environment. In this view, we can say that XML assists to achieve semantic web, and the ontology could have been developed based on XML.

After reading these three reading materials, I realized that there are a lot of studying materials about XML in online. I, literally, experienced why a user needs effective and efficient information retrieving tools to find the resource for his/her information needs.

Week9 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~miy26/lab9.html

Week9 Reading Note

HTML is a markup language for content presentation on the World Wide Web. This purpose is to support encoding the content including the various multimedia methods and providing human and machine readable syntax. And its wide usage promoting by W3 consortium assists interoperability between different application interfaces. We already examine this interoperability through the lab exercise for week 8. The HTML document encodes the content with elements and their attributes which specify a use of an element. However, the fifth version of HTML, HTML 5, is still working on the progress by a cooperation work between W3C and
the WHATWG, and it has several reinforcements comparing with the previous version of HTML 4 in many ways. Those reinforcements include below;

*New Elements
*New Attributes
*Full CSS3 Support
*Video and Audio
*2D/3D Graphics
*Local Storage
*Local SQL Database

*Web Applications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5)

XTML stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language, and it has characteristics of XML and HTML, together. There are several differences in XHTML from HTML, and they are “XHTML elements must be properly nested, XHTML elements must always be closed, XHTML elements must be in lowercase, and XHTML documents must have one root element" ( http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_xhtml.asp).

Week8 Lab

Index.html



CSS File

http://www.pitt.edu/~miy26/index.html
(Please, use Firefox interface for seeing every aspect.)

Week8 Reading Note

This week’ reading materials are enough to ease my nescience about CSS. Those three webpages are including same content about how to write style sheet and how to embed CSS into an HTML document. CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Spreadsheets’, and it defines how HTML elements are to be displayed. The logic behind CSS is not that hard to understand, but the problem, in my case, is to memorize every code and element to utilize CSS in real practice. Therefore, I expect that w3shcools’ web site would be helpful in the future. However, I believe that there are many people who create and design a web page without knowing CSS just like me because it is already embedded into a CSS-enhanced browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. In this view, I suggest that this basic but vital knowledge about behind the scenes should be learned at the beginning of the semester.

Week7 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~miy26/index.html

Week7 Reading Note

Beyond HTML is well written article to understand the initial part of the process of building a website which is more database-driven. I totally agree with the method of GSU’s web site developing. Sometimes, a website developer put priority on his interests. (Usually, he/she focuses on the aesthetic aspects of the websites regardless a user’s actual information seeking behavior.) Therefore, there is a significant gap between function of websites and the users’ needs. In this view, CMS and CSS are significant tools for information professionals. With these programs, an individual without knowledge about markup languages such as HTML has been empowered in contributing content. However, it has been 6 years after this article so the environment of the digital technology has been greatly changed, too. Now, I feel that ignorance about basic structure is producing another serious problem. In Chinese proverb, if you give a man a fish, you could feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, you would feed him for a lifetime. I know it is harsh critics but I think that current staffs in the library are like programed robots which perform their work within their range. They show a marked trend to avoid and be afraid of tasks beyond their ordinary range. Some could say that it is specialization but I want to say that they are passive in working. If a librarian has more encompassed knowledge about markup language, it would be more idealistic than working with other individuals. I suggest that a library professional should invade other domains if they are vital in increasing our job’s effectiveness and efficiency.

Week6 Lab

Barcode: 0004848965

Week6 Reading Note

In his article, Librarians and their vendors have created a tougher world for themselves, with interoperability the only solution, Andrew Pace addresses that ‘interoperability in library automation is more myth than reality’. Why does he express a negative opinion about interoperability even though everyone works for it? I dare suggest the answer of this question that we are all obsessed by delusion that we should be an early adopter in digital technology not to be a failure. As I read more articles about the library system, I think that we need some agreement on the speed of accepting new technology in the library system. The library is a public facility for providing information, not a fair for introducing new technology. Nevertheless, a current library administration applies the newest technology without verification process, and then, moves to newer technology rapidly. From the view of a patron, this trend is not appropriate economically. I suggest that a library system should consider between what it can offers and what its patrons want.

Week5 Lab

Task1

Task 2

http://www.pitt.edu/~miy26/

Week5 Reading Note

Computer network & Local area network
It is beneficial to read about a computer network and local area network because we cannot exist without communication through various network. There are many types of network as size of them; personal area network, local area network, home network, storage area network, and so on. The type of a library network should be a local area network in the view of its size, but it is not because each computer in a library is connected with internet, and it does not have own dedicated network. Through this computer network, users can “facilitate communications, permit sharing of files, data, and other types resources, share network and computing” even though it has a shortcoming that it is insecure.

RFID
My local library performed the project of switching old RFID to new 3M RFID last fall. Based on my experience about it, I agree with Karen Coyle’s opinion in Management of RFID in Libraries that old barcode technology will be replaced by RFID technology after all, but in the view of ROI, I think that adopting RFID technology in the library system is little premature. As Coyle mentions in the article, the most beneficial part of using RFID in a library is circulation department. After switching new 3M RFID, the library administration located several new self-check machines to promote patrons’ independent checking out. The problem is although checking out through RFID machine is little easier than using a previous barcoding machine, there is no significant difference between two machines. Some patrons, who do not acknowledge that machine can read multiple books at once, check out books one-by-one, and other patrons still visit the circulation desk because it is more familiar settings for them or check out pre-reserved books through on-line. In this view, I want to ask one question. “Do we really need the new technology to serve patorns , or do we merely want to be an early adaptor?”

Week4 Lab

Task1

SQL Query:

SELECT * FROM isi_jcr_report_isls

WHERE j_abbr = 'ANNU REV INFORM SCI'

AND jcr_year = 2007

Task2

SQL Query:

SELECT j_abbr, j_if
FROM isi_jcr_report_isls
WHERE jcr_year = 2008
and j_if > 1

Week4 Reading Note

Since I spent my college years during early 90’s, I did not have any academic experience such as taking a class of computer literacy. Therefore, this week’s readings, which are full of jargons and abstract concepts from Computer Science, are hard to understand. However, here is my understanding about readings.

According to readings, a database is a collection of data built for specific information needs, and two ways to classify a database are by the type of their content and by their specific subject area. The primary concern of database is to increase its efficiency and interoperability within different application. Among methods of designing a database, the entity-relationship model by Chen is popular. This, the entity-relationship model, is like drawing a blueprint adequate for customer’s needs and shows relationships between every entity within database. In this method, Chen suggested that this method is very natural, not artificial, because this method has been existed since the Ancient Greece. However, it is not used widely as much as it is quoted in academic areas due to serious limitations that it needs to be renovated frequently, and it cannot be applied in pre-existing information sources. About the database normalization process, it is a useful practice to understand actual generating process of database. It is quite similar with a process of making a calculation table in MS Excel program even though it is much complicated. Briefily, the database normalization process is to analze each entity and break entities into small tables for preventing redunducy of data.

Week3 Lab

http://www.citeulike.org/user/lis2600/library

Week3 Reading Note

Setting the stage by Gilliland

This article is a proof that Librarians and archivists have been struggling to adjust them into new digital technology and to find perfect system for their needs. Since there are many new standards and jargons, and roles of metadata in the library system are overlapping in many way, developing and finding perfect metadata must be an overwhelming experience to librarians and archivists. After reading this article, I cannot agree more with David Weinberger’s opinion that “the solution to the overabundance of information is more information” in his book, everything is miscellaneous (Weinberger, 2007).

1. The purpose of the library metadata development;
   To provide intellectual and physical access to collection materials
2. Metadata’s various roles in digital information systems;
   Description and resource discovery, the administration, accessioning, preservation, and use of collections.
3. Roles of metadata in digital information system;
   Acquisition records, exhibition catalogs, licensing agreements, and educational metadata.
4. Metadata’s various activities outside of digital information systems;
   making a Web site easier to record information about the image file, the imaging process, and image rights.

An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model by Eric J. Miller

To me, this article is more practical and understandable than the opinion from 'setting the stage' by Gilliland. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative element working groups seem to understand exactly what existing limitations of facilitating metadata in real information system are. As Miller stresses in the DCMI Requirements, we need a more flexible metadata scheme for proliferation of interoperability within systems.

Working with Endnote

It is interesting bibliographic software but I could not find any relationship with metadata which is this week’s topic.

Week2 Lab

The captured image in flickr.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46837695@N07/6720637565/in/photostream

The video in screencast.com

http://screencast.com/t/egEJnsoXD

Week 2: Computer basics, Digitization

First, it is beneficial to read articles about computer hardware and software. Thanks to the development of computers, computers are becoming more like an appliance rather than an electronic gadget. As a person uses a dishwasher without knowing its structure, a current user uses a computer without knowing its basic structures and its application. For example, in 1989, when our family bought a computer for the first time, it was not easy to turn it on and turn it off because there was no simple application and accessory such as Windows Explorer and a mouse. At that time, a user should have higher level of knowledge about computer hardware and its algorithm than a current user’s. In this view, reading what is vital hardware and software is meaningful and significant to me.

Second, Stuart D. Lee’s Is digitization worth it? is related to data compression closely. To discuss the relationship between digitization and data compression, let’s find out Lee’s opinion about digitization. He advocates the benefits of digitization; ‘increasing access, preservation, and meeting strategic goals’, and I generally agree with him. However, I want to suggest that the purpose of digitization should be focused more on expending dissemination of information rather than convenient and effective way of preserving resources. As we already learned from Wikipedia’s article about data compression, there are chances to lost data partially after lossy data compression. After lossy data compression, the output of digitization is not exactly same quality of original resource, especially arts and audio files. Nicholson Baker states this negative result of digitization clearly in his book, Double Fold. Librarians and archivists should continue to pay their attentions on that the output of digitization could not be substituted with the original resources perfectly and to make an effort in preserve the original items.

Hello. My name is Minhwa Youn

It is nice to have a space where I express my own ideas. I usually did blogging a decade ago, but I did not recently. I hope that I can see many postings at the end of the semester.