Muddiest Point

Am I a fool for not believing all of this "No Place to Hide" stuff?! Maybe I am. I don't know. I don't think I am. Maybe I shouldn't even be typing this because someone might be creepin' over my shoulder, looking for my personal info. YIKES!

Unit 13 readings

No Place To Hide seems awfully paranoid to me. I recognize the importance of protecting patron's account information, as well as keeping confidential the materials that they check out from a library, but the insinuation that "They know where you live, the value of your home, the names of your friends and family, in some cases even what you read" seems awfully conspiracy theory to me. Should I work in a lending position, I would certainly do my best to protect the privacy of patrons, but I don't know that Big Brother is as prevalent as No Place To Hide wants us to think.

Muddiest Point

I do really love the idea that libraries are integrating loads of 2.0 technology into their operations, but I can't shake the feeling that blogs & wikis still seem kind of...unprofessional. Could that change? Will that change? I don't know. Blogs to me are still sort of lifejournal-y and thus kind of emo and college-y. Aka unprofessional.

Unit 12 readings

Wikis are inarguably quite useful. They're collaborative and interactive and really, really easy to use. I think they're a little annoying, but ultimately good to know and use. I see no reason why wikis and libraries cannot coexist & cohabitate with results that are anything less than successful.

I love social tagging, and I use folksonomies like crazy. My flickr relies intrinsically on tags, as does my del.icio.us. Incorporating them into library catalogs scares me at times, but Penn has had such dazzling success that I don't see why it wouldn't work everywhere. And probably with really great results.

Comments

Commented on:

Kerri's blog


and

Maggie's blog

Muddiest Point

For all of the plain, visible quandaries with digital libraries, they exist in astonishing numbers. Do we owe this to the laziness of users or is it actually that librarians and computer scientists truly are bedfellows? I think it's the former.

Unit 11 readings

Mischo writes, "The goal of seamless federation across distributed, heterogeneous resources remains the holy grail of digital library work." How could we even achieve this? Not all authors are going to agree to this equal distribution. They want money, right? Not. Gonna. Happen. Also, this point really intrigued me, as it's definitely something I've noticed working reference at Hillman: "It is interesting that Google Scholar is being held up as the competition for both campus institutional repository systems (at least in terms of search and discovery) and academic library federated searching." This is tangential to the Digital Library issue, but I think catalogers will have to totally revamp catalogs to better reflect and serve the kind of searching that both students and the public will likely be doing as a result of using & loving Google.

The "Dewey Meets Turing" article brings up some really good points. The authors wrote, "The disruption to the library community was greatly exacerbated by many journal publishers' business decision to charge at a premium for digital content. This decision has been forcing academic libraries to cancel subscriptions, undermining their role as conduits to scholarly work," a point which so greatly frustrates me. Journal flipping, at the rate which we're going, makes me immeasurably nervous, and similarly, I think it does a great disservice to public patrons who will be unable to access things they otherwise could have accessed.

Maybe I don't yet trust digitization and digital libraries enough. Who knows.

Assignment 6: so I built a website

It lives here.

Unit 10 readings

David Hawking's first article has made my little brain explode (this is a recurring theme in my reading notes!! brain explosion!!) I really like learning about web crawlers. I also secretly like learning about how Google and other search engines index search results. Hawkings writes that, "It is not uncommon to find that a crawler has locked up, ground to a halt, crashed, burned up an entire network traffic budget, or unintentionally inflicted a denial-of-service attack on a Web server whose operator is now very irate." This is kind of awesome. WHOA. Crawlers are totally awesome and Hawking's writings have only served to reinforce my belief of this.

In his second article, Hawking writes that "The major problem with the simple-query processor is that it returns poor results. In response to the query "the Onion" (seeking the satirical newspaper site), pages about soup and gardening would almost certainly swamp the desired result." How can we avoid this, especially in library catalogs? It seems to me we somehow need to create even smarter search engines (if that's possible?). This also reminds me of the time that I wanted to find information about a band called Condominium, and all I knew about them is that they were from Minneapolis, so I (foolishly) googled "Condominium Minneapolis" and was like, "Uh, I'm not interested in Minneapolis real estate...now what?"

WHY DOESN'T HAWKING TALK ABOUT SEARCH RELATED ADS??? I hate those. They creep me out. Why do they do that?!

The Deep Web! Bergman's article is some scary stuff!!!! Bergman writes, "Internet searchers are therefore searching only 0.03% — or one in 3,000 — of the pages available to them today." I seriously never considered that this might even be so. Because I am a dummy and foolishly trust & love google, I assumed they were able to search and find everything. Foiled!

Muddiest Point

In David Hawking's article Web Search Engines part 1, he writes, "Search engines cannot and should not index every page on the Web." My question: why shouldn't they index every page? I mean, why not? Is this a question of ethics or merely a question of time?

XML reading comments

I am totally unsure how to use XML, and these readings haven't really helped me all that much. I think I'm too hands-on for this. The tutorial did help a little bit, but otherwise, I'm really floundering. I don't get the jargon, and I think maybe too much of the how-to is lost for me in the technical mumbo-jumbo. Nervous!

Muddiest Point

I am really, really frustrated with HTML & XML. Is this something I could even conceivably learn just by reading about it? I don't think so. This means, however, that I'm going to have to buckle down and actually use both and that really kind of frustrates and daunts me.

Comments

This week I posted on:

Kerri's blog

and

Micquel's blog

Koha Assignment

Here's my Koha collection. It exclusively features books about Buffy. Yay!!

Unit 8 Readings

The first three readings seem like they'll be quite helpful in the event that I have to make a website. I'd never heard of CSS, so that was a surprising and informative reading. I bookmarked the first reading--it's bound to be pretty useful sometimes to have an HTML cheatsheet handy.

The article from Library Hi Tech doesn't seem all too insightful or remarkable. Isn't this kind of change pretty commonplace for libraries anymore (in particular, libraries as troubled as those in the Georgia State University Library)? Seems to me most librarians and libraries are overhauling everything they can as fast as they can...

Muddiest point

All this talk of website building has me pretty nervous. Once I think I had an AOL homepage dedicated to horses or something, but that has thus far been the extent of my web savviness. That said, web design is theoretically getting fairly simple and easy (at least, that's my understanding of it). Does this put billions of web designers out of work? Are fancy websites going to be built by any Joe Six-Pack* anymore??




*Um, I can't resist.

Comments

I commented on:

Valerie's blog

and

Theresa's blog

Assignment 4

My screenshots

My Jing video

Unit 7 reading

The Howstuffworks article on Internet Infrastructure hurt my brain. I prefer to think that there are little gnomes inside my computer connecting me to websites and URLs. I prefer to think this way because then I don't have to think about things like this sentence: "An OC-3 line is capable of transmitting 155 Mbps while an OC-48 can transmit 2,488 Mbps (2.488 Gbps)." I think I have a grasp on the internet (I mean, I know how to snatch 5 Swatches on Ebay for under $10 and even how to use emoticons!!!?) but this technical stuff blows my little mind. Yuck. Admittedly, I DO love that the internet exists without a specific owner, and that regulations on it are kind of minimal and amorphous.

I get incredibly nervous when I read articles like "Dismantling Integrated Library Systems." Yes--I think technology is fantastic, more so when applied successfully and seamlessly to libraries, but I worry that librarians are forgetting about the point of libraries and getting too mired in technology. Patrons want service, and they want it fast. This is true. A faster, better, newer ILS might be the way to go here--I can't dispute that--but if this is coming at the expense of paper collections development and paper subscriptions (undoubtedly what many patrons want--particularly for public patrons in academic libraries, as well as elderly patrons), then I'm simply not interested. This is all just business talk to me--one vendor gives me this, the other vendor gives me that. Blah blah blah.

The Google video is pretty neat. I'm a fan of Google--their incredibly innovative and accessible projects have fascinated me for years, and will probably continue to do so. The fact that their employees seem relatively happy is another plus. Keep it up, Google.

p.s. Google, it's too bad for you that Yahoo snatched up flickr...! Must be the bane of your existence...

Muddiest Point

Aren't we going to run out of IP addresses eventually? Like, do we really have enough out there? There are so many computers, networks and people and simply not enough numbers. Is this going to be like when we had to start dialing an area code just to call local numbers?