Thursday, November 25, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Muddiest Point for 11-22 - 11-26
Do you think that web search engines will evolve to the point that they will be able to retrieve results from the deep web on a consistent basis?
Readings for 11-29 - 12-3
Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries
Simply speaking, a weblog (or blog) is a Web site that resembles a personal journal and is updated with entries and postings. What is really nice about blogs is that the entries/postings are dated, and sometimes are assigned category headings and keywords. Essentially, a blog is an online equivalent to a paper diary, reading list, newspaper, and address book all in one. One of the best things about blogging software is the ability to archive entries, which can be searched, browsed, and reviewed at any time in the future. The very first weblog was created by Tim Berners-Lee when he was working for CERN. Rebecca Blood laid the foundation for what blogs would become in 1993 by providing links to new Web sites. The term was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 on his site, Robot Wisdom. Eventually, the "blogosphere" arose which describes the large community of webloggers that now number in the millions. Blogs are closely related to social software, which adhere to three key principles: support for interaction between individuals or groups, support for social feedbacl, and support for social networks.
Using a Wiki to Manage Library Instruction Program
A wiki is a multi-author, collaborative software program that helps people self-publish and share information. Libraries should strongly consider using this technology in order to create better information sharing, facilitate collaboration in the creation of resources, and divide the worklaods among librarians. The two chief uses for library instruction wikis include: sharing knowledge and the ability to cooperate in creating resources like guidelines and handouts. Libraries could create wikis and allow users to participate in the creation of them. However, libraries should be aware of the risk involved with lettinf users contribute to information. One way to get around this could be to assign a password in order to get into the wiki. Nevertheless, the benefits are numerous. Libraries could create wikis on various professors that include what those professors expect and want in their classes, guidelines on specific assigmnemts within various professors' classes, and updated changes to professors' assignments. The uses for wikis in libraries could be endless and should definitely be considered.
Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy
Social tagging is a new, but growing, phenomenon that allows individuals to create bookmarks (also known as tags) for Web sites and save them online. These tags include subject keywords chosen by the user and often a brief description of the site. Libraries could increase their use by allowing such practices to be included in their institutions. This could help students, professors, and researchers look for better information when doing various academic tasks. One of the great advantages of tagging is bringin "gray literature" into play. A lot of valuable information created by experts and scholars cannot be found easily if students are not connected to the associations or scholarly networks that share this literature. Tags that are created by curators who have access to this information would allow students to dive into these rich resources that they would have otherwise not been able to access. On the contrary, one of the great risks of tagging is "spagging," or spam tagging. Users could create tags to websites that are unsuitable for their own profit or just to cause havoc. Another problem is the variety of keywords chosen for tags, which could cause much confusion. Finally, allowing users to contribute to this process would significantly diminish the "gatekeeping" role of librarians. Are we willing to do this in order to bring more users into play, which would increase the use of the library?
Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
I found this talk to be very interesting. I never knew the exact organizational qualities of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales did a nice job of explaining the history of the website, and how it is managed. I found it interesting that Wikipedia is much more factual than many people have said. When I was in undergraduate school, I was constantly being told how never to use Wikipedia because anybody can edit it and there are thousands of mistakes. Wales pointed out that only about 18% of editing is done by anonymous users, and even if editing is done, it has to go through a process of determining if the information is correct. Naturally, with the size of the community Wlaes refers to, there are always going to be problems with certain pages. The talk about voting for the deletion of pages is an ingenious idea I think. People can vote whether or not to have certain pages deleted, and based upon new information, pages that are deemed certain for deletion may still have a chance to survive because of this new information. Wales mentioned many times about the policy of neutrality and Wikipedia. I appreciate his ardent ideals about being neutral when presenting information, but there is no possible way that any human being can be completely neutral about anything. Therefore, I see this as one of the downsides to the Wikipedia experiment. However, this is not Wikipedia's fault, it is just a fact of human nature.
Simply speaking, a weblog (or blog) is a Web site that resembles a personal journal and is updated with entries and postings. What is really nice about blogs is that the entries/postings are dated, and sometimes are assigned category headings and keywords. Essentially, a blog is an online equivalent to a paper diary, reading list, newspaper, and address book all in one. One of the best things about blogging software is the ability to archive entries, which can be searched, browsed, and reviewed at any time in the future. The very first weblog was created by Tim Berners-Lee when he was working for CERN. Rebecca Blood laid the foundation for what blogs would become in 1993 by providing links to new Web sites. The term was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 on his site, Robot Wisdom. Eventually, the "blogosphere" arose which describes the large community of webloggers that now number in the millions. Blogs are closely related to social software, which adhere to three key principles: support for interaction between individuals or groups, support for social feedbacl, and support for social networks.
Using a Wiki to Manage Library Instruction Program
A wiki is a multi-author, collaborative software program that helps people self-publish and share information. Libraries should strongly consider using this technology in order to create better information sharing, facilitate collaboration in the creation of resources, and divide the worklaods among librarians. The two chief uses for library instruction wikis include: sharing knowledge and the ability to cooperate in creating resources like guidelines and handouts. Libraries could create wikis and allow users to participate in the creation of them. However, libraries should be aware of the risk involved with lettinf users contribute to information. One way to get around this could be to assign a password in order to get into the wiki. Nevertheless, the benefits are numerous. Libraries could create wikis on various professors that include what those professors expect and want in their classes, guidelines on specific assigmnemts within various professors' classes, and updated changes to professors' assignments. The uses for wikis in libraries could be endless and should definitely be considered.
Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy
Social tagging is a new, but growing, phenomenon that allows individuals to create bookmarks (also known as tags) for Web sites and save them online. These tags include subject keywords chosen by the user and often a brief description of the site. Libraries could increase their use by allowing such practices to be included in their institutions. This could help students, professors, and researchers look for better information when doing various academic tasks. One of the great advantages of tagging is bringin "gray literature" into play. A lot of valuable information created by experts and scholars cannot be found easily if students are not connected to the associations or scholarly networks that share this literature. Tags that are created by curators who have access to this information would allow students to dive into these rich resources that they would have otherwise not been able to access. On the contrary, one of the great risks of tagging is "spagging," or spam tagging. Users could create tags to websites that are unsuitable for their own profit or just to cause havoc. Another problem is the variety of keywords chosen for tags, which could cause much confusion. Finally, allowing users to contribute to this process would significantly diminish the "gatekeeping" role of librarians. Are we willing to do this in order to bring more users into play, which would increase the use of the library?
Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
I found this talk to be very interesting. I never knew the exact organizational qualities of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales did a nice job of explaining the history of the website, and how it is managed. I found it interesting that Wikipedia is much more factual than many people have said. When I was in undergraduate school, I was constantly being told how never to use Wikipedia because anybody can edit it and there are thousands of mistakes. Wales pointed out that only about 18% of editing is done by anonymous users, and even if editing is done, it has to go through a process of determining if the information is correct. Naturally, with the size of the community Wlaes refers to, there are always going to be problems with certain pages. The talk about voting for the deletion of pages is an ingenious idea I think. People can vote whether or not to have certain pages deleted, and based upon new information, pages that are deemed certain for deletion may still have a chance to survive because of this new information. Wales mentioned many times about the policy of neutrality and Wikipedia. I appreciate his ardent ideals about being neutral when presenting information, but there is no possible way that any human being can be completely neutral about anything. Therefore, I see this as one of the downsides to the Wikipedia experiment. However, this is not Wikipedia's fault, it is just a fact of human nature.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Muddiest Point for 11-15 - 11-19
Since technology is always advancing and the general public is pushing for more digital and on-line information, does this mean the traditional library is in danger of becoming extinct? Will digital libraries and repositories take over the role that traditional libraries have provided for hundreds of years?
Readings for 11-22 - 11-26
Web Search Engine: Parts I & II
These articles provided a nice summary of the basic functions and set-ups of various web search engines. The first article discussed how web search engines indexed certain types of information. I found it both fascinating and discouraging that millions of pieces of information are constantly being put on the web and indexed. The GYM engines (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) are indexing pieces of information at a thousand times the rate at which they used too. The discussion about crawling and crawlers was useful as well. Crawlers save a lot of time because they eliminate duplicate resources, which is very much appreciated in a field that is always pressed for time in terms of doing things. Part II of the article discussed various algorithms and methods that are used for search queries. The most important thing I gathered about queries was the "clever assigment of document numbers" section. Instead of numbering documents arbitrarily, the indexer can number them to reflect their decreasing query score. This achieves effective postings compression, skipping (skipping certain words), and early termination.
Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
The Open Archives Initiative's basic mission is to "develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content." However, this initiative has spread to a wide variety of other communities who were looking to provide access and information about their respective interests. Three examples were used to show the diversity of this initiative. The AmericanSouth.org project, the UIUC project, and the OAIster project were all involved with preserving and organizing important information about hose particular organization's interests. Even though this initiative has given many benefits to various organizations, there are some challenges that must be tackled. These include the varieties of metadata, the different formats of metadata, and communication problems within the initiative. I would suggest that standars should be mandated by these organizations that will help counter these problems. I would use the Dublin Core Metadata standards to correct the metadata problems, and I would suggest coming up with a definitive vocabulary for the initiative so confusion can be minimized for future providers and users.
The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value
This was, by far, one of the most surprising articles I have read since coming to the MLIS program. This article basically explained the main differences between surface web sites and deep web sites. Some of the statistical information this author points out is mind-boggling. For example, deep web documents are 27% smaller than surface web documents; deep web sites receive about half as much monthly traffic as surface sites; deep web sites are more highly linked to other sites than surface sites; 97.4% of deep web sites are publicly available (which was a surprise to me); and finally, the deep web is about 500 times larger than the surface web. There is also a great diversity of topics covered in the deep web from agriculture to humanities to shopping. The thing that surprised me the most was that the deep web has an overall higher quality rating (satisfaction) than the surface web by 7.6%! All of this information leads me to believe that there is a high quality amount of information in the deep web that is not accessed. Maybe information professionals should be pushing harder to "surface" some of this information. Also, there should be a greater effort to educate the public about this topic.
These articles provided a nice summary of the basic functions and set-ups of various web search engines. The first article discussed how web search engines indexed certain types of information. I found it both fascinating and discouraging that millions of pieces of information are constantly being put on the web and indexed. The GYM engines (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) are indexing pieces of information at a thousand times the rate at which they used too. The discussion about crawling and crawlers was useful as well. Crawlers save a lot of time because they eliminate duplicate resources, which is very much appreciated in a field that is always pressed for time in terms of doing things. Part II of the article discussed various algorithms and methods that are used for search queries. The most important thing I gathered about queries was the "clever assigment of document numbers" section. Instead of numbering documents arbitrarily, the indexer can number them to reflect their decreasing query score. This achieves effective postings compression, skipping (skipping certain words), and early termination.
Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
The Open Archives Initiative's basic mission is to "develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content." However, this initiative has spread to a wide variety of other communities who were looking to provide access and information about their respective interests. Three examples were used to show the diversity of this initiative. The AmericanSouth.org project, the UIUC project, and the OAIster project were all involved with preserving and organizing important information about hose particular organization's interests. Even though this initiative has given many benefits to various organizations, there are some challenges that must be tackled. These include the varieties of metadata, the different formats of metadata, and communication problems within the initiative. I would suggest that standars should be mandated by these organizations that will help counter these problems. I would use the Dublin Core Metadata standards to correct the metadata problems, and I would suggest coming up with a definitive vocabulary for the initiative so confusion can be minimized for future providers and users.
The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value
This was, by far, one of the most surprising articles I have read since coming to the MLIS program. This article basically explained the main differences between surface web sites and deep web sites. Some of the statistical information this author points out is mind-boggling. For example, deep web documents are 27% smaller than surface web documents; deep web sites receive about half as much monthly traffic as surface sites; deep web sites are more highly linked to other sites than surface sites; 97.4% of deep web sites are publicly available (which was a surprise to me); and finally, the deep web is about 500 times larger than the surface web. There is also a great diversity of topics covered in the deep web from agriculture to humanities to shopping. The thing that surprised me the most was that the deep web has an overall higher quality rating (satisfaction) than the surface web by 7.6%! All of this information leads me to believe that there is a high quality amount of information in the deep web that is not accessed. Maybe information professionals should be pushing harder to "surface" some of this information. Also, there should be a greater effort to educate the public about this topic.
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