LIS 2600 Blog: Weekly Reading: January 2012

Monday, January 30, 2012

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!

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.

The difference between hardware and software has always been quite evident to me. I always think of it this way:

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.