Week 15 Reading

• From what I understand so far, "cloud" computing refers to storing files on a central server that one may never see. These servers are stored in special warehouses which are closely monitored and climate controlled. They use a lot of energy and are often set up in climates that are naturally dry i.e. desert climates. For example, Microsoft has moved to offer Cloud Storage to its XBOX Live customers.
• This guy in the video with the glasses is creepy...
• But how secure are these "clouds"?
• Also, cloud computing is not very green.
• Libraries are still the best excuse for hoarding materials. This is part of why I love the profession.

I really enjoyed this article:
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2006/11/the-future-of-libraries/

Week 13 Lab

http://liswiki.org/wiki/User:Kmm202

Week 14 Reading

• Oh gods please no! Don't make me read this "No Place to Hide" thing! I understand that while you are online, you leave a footprint on every page you visit. And I understand that we are under constant surveillance, but honestly I am sick of hearing and reading about it.
• I thought that the TIA had existed much earlier than 2002?
• TIA sounds like it was a huge violation of privacy, but so is the PATRIOT Act and we still have that hanging around. Except now everyone things that Obama was behind in when in actuality it was passed under the early W. Bush administration.
• Also, part of the PATRIOT Act was that libraries would have to release patron records. I still remember the ALA's privacy movement with the Militant Librarian buttons. I would love to have one of those.
• I'm glad that Vermont is trying to clarify library privacy policies under the law.

Week 13 Reading

• Since arriving at the iSchool in August, I find that people throw the term "Web 2.0" around, often without really understanding its true definition. 
• "typically... describe[s] technologies such as wikis, weblogs, and other collaborative tools."
• The term "social networking" had been in use long before the invention of social media. At least in my opinion it has.
• Thomas Paine's pamphlets were actually not that widely distributed among the general population. If you think about it, at the time of the American Revolution, a majority of the population was illiterate. The majority of Paine's pamphlets were held by those who were literate and those who could read were often in the public square reading the pamphlets aloud to the illiterate masses. I'll get off my historian's soap box now.
• I'm always a little hesitant about putting my true thoughts about key issues out there on social media sites because ANYONE can look at them. Accessibility is the double-edged sword of social media.
• Wikis are actually one of my favorite forms of social media. I am involved in several video game related wikis. Not only do I read them, I have also written and edited wikis.
• I find it humorous that the author keeps coming back to "Star Wars Kid." As a tribute to the author:

• I find that people today are much more willing to use wikis to manage and access information. I believe that this is partially due to the success of Wikipedia and Wikia. This is a useful tool in the library. For example, the LibGuides used by the ULS are a special kind of Wiki used in teaching patrons about library services and conducting research.
• The problem with Wikipedia is that ANYONE can edit a page. This the best blog post that I have found that "complains" about Wikipedia and its use by "scholars":  http://fml-mlisn.blogspot.com/2011/10/thoughts-on-wikipedia.html

Week 11 Lab

Web of Knowledge: Topic=("digital libraries") AND Topic=("virtual reference")
Timespan=2008-2012

Topic=("digital libraries") AND Topic=("digital reference")

Timespan= 2008-2012

Google Scholar: "digital libraries" AND "virtual reference" since 2008

"digital libraries" AND "digital reference" since 2008

Week 12 Reading

• Every time I think about indexing I think about LIS 2005 and how much I wanted to burn that project... but one cannot burn files on a computer... -_- I'm just glad that I will not have to do that by hand again if the technology to index keeps growing.
• It bothers me when a student believes that by Google-ing something they are searching the entire internet. Google should not be your once and done research spot.
• "Crawling"... wait what? Further explanation is needed.
• Ah so that's what Google is talking about when they say something about their "algorithm." They're talking about crawling... I see...
• "Modern spammers create artificial Web landscapes of domains, servers, links, and pages to inflate the link scores of the targets they have been paid to promotes. Spammers also engage in cloaking, the process of delivering different content to crawlers than site visitors." Even if you send me to your crap, I still won't buy it. 
• My trained revulsion to math causes me to gag a little every time I see certain words like "algorithm" or "problem" or "solve for x."
• This article is jargon laden and I am having a hard time following it...
• When the authors talk about compressed data, is that similar to data compressed into a zip file on a computer? 
• What is this "Deep Web" you speak of my friend?

Week 11 Readings

• As soon as I see the entity relationship model on the first page of the Digital Libraries article I want to do this:

• I feel that it may be next to impossible for we as librarians to offer our users seamless access to the information they are looking for. The "lasso" that we are using to try to pull everything together just isn't big enough, and no matter how much money we throw at it, I feel like it never will be.
• "It has now become commonplace for both major and small-scale publishers to provide Web-based access to their full-text journal issues and articles."<--- This is kind of sink or swim. In order for a publisher to make any money today, they MUST provide this service or people will go somewhere else.
• It's bothersome to think that Google grew out of a research performed under the Stanford DLI-1 project... especially because Google is worth billions.
• "Whether digital library work will continue to be interesting to the computer science community at large is an open question." If we continue to throw money at them for it, it will be. 
• "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." I often find Google Scholar searches to be frustrating unless I am on Pitt's campus because most articles are on a pay for view basis. If I am on Pitt's campus it is more likely that I will be able to view article that I was through Google Scholar because it is part of a subscription that Pitt already has.
• Also, just because some our institutional repository systems are taking a back seat to Google Scholar, does not mean that we should discontinue our management of them. If we can find a way to make them better than Google Scholar, people will come back to them on their own.
• The problem that I find with librarians working with computer scientists is that we "speak" different languages. A certain word that a librarian uses could mean one thing to her, but it could mean something completely different to a computer scientist. We have to find that common ground between us when we begin our work, otherwise, a lot of time and money is wasted.
• "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 of scholarly work." You don't say! People would rather turn to Google today than to the library for their reference questions. 

Week 9 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/lab9.html

Week 10 Readings

• XML = Extensible Markup Language
• based on SGML "Standard Generalized Markup Language" also known as "Sounds great, maybe later."
• does the browser necessarily need to know "what the information is" in a line of code? This sounds like technology that will become intelligent... like in Terminator... just kidding, but I still do not see the point.
• Ah wait I see. We did it all for international postal codes...

• You see this is where things get complicated. As human beings, we are always making everything more complicated by messing with them. Why do we do this? Because we want to make things better but we make them worse instead.
• It's always nice when a tutorial tells me that something is relatively simple. It makes me feel a lot better about XML.
• So if I understand what is going on here correctly, writing a page in XML makes it easier to "search" that page later on or for someone else to search it.
• Even though I read both of the XML tutorials, I am still lost with the XML Schema...

Week 9 Reading

• So not only did we learn HTML now we are learning HTML5... what is the difference?
• HTML5 = It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and is still under development today. How can one learn it if is still being developed?
• "It is also an attempt to define a single markup language that can be written in either HTML or XHTML syntax." So basically HTML5 is an effort to streamline markup languages. This makes me happy.
• The idea that HTML5 could be used to design web pages for mobile devices is exciting.
• I'm not really sure that I understand what Scalable Vector Graphics are... No actually I do not understand exactly what they do for me...
• And if HTML5 is a work in progress then how is it that many web browsers today can be HTML5 compatible? Explain that one please.
• Never mind. The W3 tutorial answered that one for me.
• Honestly, I do not really see much difference between HTML5 and the HTML that we are using now in class.
• I mean there are some new semantic elements but other than that there are very few differences in it for me. But this may be because I have not seen the evolution of HTML like other people have.
• What is the difference between HTML 4.01 and XHTML? It seems that the only differences are that XHTML is very touchy about little mistakes that you might make while coding...

Week 8 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/index.html

Week 7 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/index.html

Week 8 Notes

This week I decided to go backwards in the readings. I am unfamiliar with CSS so I decided to read chapter two from Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web first in hopes that it would give me a good introduction.

• CSS seems to be a style add-on to HTML
• Have you ever read something and then had to go back and read it all over again because you have no idea what you just read? Yeah...
• This gluing thing... wait what?
• Why not just write the style sheet into the HTML sheet in the first place? WRITE THEM TOGETHER!
• This book must be old if it is referring to Netscape and IE4. Obviously the material is still relevant.
• I believe that all browsers today have CSS capabilities. That or I'm living in an alternate reality.
• Now we're inserting text gifs?!

• Does anyone realize that one can write a blog in HTML with CSS? It seems to be a good way to practice the techniques in these readings cause that's how I wrote this one!

• I love the W3 Schools tutorials. They break everything down into terms that a former liberal arts major like me can understand.
• Now I see why they call them "cascading" style sheets. These things can really get away from you if you're not careful.
• Well at least W3 answered my question about why CSS is contained in a different style sheet:

"When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file."

• Also I was right. All browsers today do support CSS. One that doesn't is just silly.

Week 6 Lab

BARCODE: 19842006

Week 7 Reading

• "A markup language is a set of markup tags." That really does not tell me much.
• Dreamweaver sounds like some kind of program from children, not an HTML editor.
• I'm so glad that we have an HTML cheat sheet. I cannot memorize all of this stuff.
• I wonder if the web development librarian at Georgia State University Library had as much trouble composing MySQL command prompts as I did. Sometimes, it made me so angry that I had to walk away from it for a while. 
• Is a lack of awareness the reason that the CMS model has not been picked up by other academic libraries?

Week 5 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/index.html

Week 6 Notes

• ISP = Internet Service Provider
• POP = Point of Presence- place for local users to access the company's network, often through a phone number or dedicated line (I wonder how much it costs for a company to set up something like this. Also the picture is using a T3 line which is VERY expensive.)
• NAP = Network Access Points
• Maybe the concepts presented in this first article do not seem revolutionary or amazing to me because I was born in 1989.
• T1 lines are also expensive, but they are RIDICULOUSLY fast. It's like popping a six foot wide hole in the Hoover Dam. The amount of data that can be bounced back and forth over it is mind boggling. 
• IP Address = Internet Protocol- language computers use to communicate over the internet
• Re-tooling ILS will prove to be a profitable business ventures for some companies, but can libraries really afford the cost? Probably not. This is depressing.
• "Moreover, libraries no longer want to search myriad information silos but desire one-stop search and retrieval. They no longer serve 300–400 users in a controlled environment but thousands of users over the web." I do not think that we in the library world anticipated the internet boom, so it caught us unprepared.
• "Librarians are also motivated to seek solutions because of healthy competition with peers and disparate information resources." I feel like the term "healthy competition" is an understatement. Especially when some of us look like this while changing these systems for the better or coming up with solutions of our own. The competition makes us crazy!  

Courtesy Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

• We have to dismantle ILS to rebuild it? YOU DON'T SAY?

• The fact that there is internet in Antarctica is mind boggling. The environmental road bumps that they run into must be crazy.
• Does the Google Foundation still exist? I've never heard of it until now.
• Also, does Orkut still exist? I think they call it "Google plus" now.
• I have an alternative to Google Answers. It's called IPL2 and it's FREE.
• I understand the idea of making information more accessible through the Google Book Project, but what bothers me is that since these books are being digitized, there are less physical copies of these books and eventually, you will only be able to find them in a digitized format. One of my biggest fears is an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that destroys the servers and such where these files are being stored. If there is no existing physical copy of a book who's digital counterpart was lost in the EMP or other natural disaster, then it is lost forever. We could end up losing important deposits of knowledge this way. Maybe I am being paranoid, but I feel like my fears are justified.
• But from a historical stand point I like the idea of being able to preserve authors' works through digitization. I love being able to read a broadside from the 18th century without having to travel to archive where it is physically stored.

Week 4 Lab

I was unsuccessful in this week's lab. I could not even connect to the database. I attempted to connect on several occasions over the past two days, but to little avail. I have disabled my firewalls and my virus protection but to no avail.

I sought help, but Jiepu was unable to assist me. I even tried someone else's computer. I was still unsuccessful.

I am very disappointed.

Week 5 Notes

• I have used LANs before mostly for Halo Parties with friends. Setting up a LAN is not that hard, you just have to have some basic IT experience to do it.
• Saying that something is "the year of the LAN" makes it sound a lot more exciting than it actually is... but I guess that at the time, the idea of hooking multiple computers/printers together so that they could communicate with one another was a truly revolutionary idea. 
•  The internet is a series of tubes OR a series of networks.
• I always find it difficult to keep a remote connection to the ULS network when I am off campus. It seems to be unstable.
• RFID = radio frequency identifier
• I have heard of using RFID tags in libraries, but unfortunately the tags have short read ranges and are expensive.
• The PA Turnpike uses RFID tags in their Easy Pass devices.
• My parents' dog has a microchip that uses RFID technology.
• I still remember when bar codes were introduced to our library when I was in elementary school. I certainly streamlined the work flow of the library.
• RFID tags would be helpful in the library especially when trying to locate books that were put back in the wrong place! I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to get a book of the shelf, only to find that it has been lost in the stacks due to someone being irresponsible with it!

Week 3 Lab

Lab 3 CiteuLike

Week 4 Notes

•  I have heard about nothing but problems since Cloud Databases started to be introduced to the public for their use. My boyfriend works in IT and he says that the biggest problem with Clouds is security. You cannot secure something that is so easily accessible.
• Clouds may also save space initially, but they put huge pulls on the environment. They have to be housed in special storage areas with controlled environments and they usually are not kept in corners of the earth that are known for having cooler climates.
• In my mind a database is just a library shoved into a computer server. Instead of pulling a book off a shelf, you pull it off of the server, which may or may not be connected to the internet.
• In LIS we use a lot of entity-relationship models and they always make me want to punch a wall.
• Entity-relationship models remind me of flow-charts because that is pretty much what they are. I do not like the one in the Wikipedia article so here's a better one about bacon:

• I can see how entity-relationship models would be helpful to someone designing a database, but I think that they are only helpful to the person who created it. The ones that I run into are always so abstract that they're Greek to me.
• I'm a little confused about this thing called "atomicity." Even the definition is confusing. Someone please explain this!

Week 2 Lab

http://www.screencast.com/users/BlackWolfCries

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwolf1489/

Week 3 Notes

•  Metadata is always defined as "data about data" but the actual meaning of this definition can vary from field to field
• Metadata is used by many different fields for many different things 
• Information scientists are often involved in the creation of metadata but metadata is now being created by non-professionals on social websites and all over the internet
• I am annoyed at the idea of another attempt at standardization in the world of metadata (DCMI). Have we not learned that this is what is inevitable:

• Honestly this Dublin Core reading is so complicated that I am having trouble comprehending it. It's entirely too technical...
• I see that we will be learning to use three different bibliographic systems: EndNote, RefWorks, and Zotero... I already have a RefWorks account and I prefer that one. Also, I never use FireFox, I prefer Chrome, so I may not use Zotero very often.
• I can see how EndNote would be useful to have, but I usually download any article that I am using and cite it myself immediately. As usual I am wary of new technology like most people.

Week 2 Notes

• The difference between hardware and software has always been quite evident to me. I always think of it this way:
• hard = something you can touch
• soft = something that is "untouchable" yet relies on hardware to exist
• Why is the software section so much longer than the hardware section? I guess it's harder to explain to someone especially if they have never encountered a computer program before.
• Comparing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to Henry Ford and Lois Chevrolet is... odd. It just makes me feel funny but honestly what they did to the software industry is technically the modern equivalent.
• I enjoy trying to wrap my mind around how software is wrapped up in so many things at once. The layer structure presented on this wiki is interesting.
• I feel like the reasons for digitization always have to do with the amount of space available in a library or archive and the amount of money it may cost/save.
• The problem with digitization is the format of a digitized item. I feel like we're constantly arguing about converting files to certain programs in the library community. We are quite frightened of the idea of a digitized item that took so much time and effort becoming obsolete because of the format it was digitized in.
• I don't understand why the Europeans are so worried about being put on the same level as the Americans or being outdone by us. Calm down and do your thing.
• Google has had a monopoly on "book search" and digitization for the past five years and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
• As soon as this article on data compression started talking about algorithms my mind kind of blanked out. I cannot do math or calculus for that matter.