Week 7 reading notes, etc.

I'm back from Pittsburgh, and although it was a rushed trip, I'm glad to have had the chance to meet with some of the people in my classes.

And yes, I'm a bit late in posting these reading notes, but better late than never, I suppose.

David Hawking, Web Search Engines Part I--

I had never heard the term "politeness" to describe a way to prevent too many server requests from forming a bottleneck, but it makes sense to introduce delays when necessary in order for a server not to be overwhelmed (in the same way highway on-ramps at rush hour only allow one car per green light). Parallelism is clearly important for making maximal use of the server's capacities; I was surprised to hear how complex (and prone to crash) these systems are.

David Hawking, Web Search Engines Part II--

I was interested to read about some of the ways that algorithms aim to improve result quality within search engines. This reminded me of some of the things Professor He said in the lecture when I was on campus about how the highest number of hits doesn't always equal the "right" search result: for example, "Java" might mean a programming language, a country, or coffee, and a good search engine will show all three of those on the front page of results. (Similarly, the article mentioned the importance of distinguishing a search for the political satire magazine "The Onion" from countless recipes and gardening sites.) Programmers clearly have to think of many subtleties when designing search engines; I was glad to learn about some aspects that I hadn't considered (skipping, caching, assigning document numbers intentionally, etc.).

Lesk Chapter 4 --

Text searches seem utterly simple by comparison to other digital media files' data. I know the technology is still developing, but it's remarkable to me that automatic recognition programs (for indexing images) work at all, and it's unsurprising that they currently work only imperfectly. I'm also not surprised that media formats whose content unfolds over time, such as video and audio, are still harder to search for content than images are. I know that textual tagging helps greatly, and can be used in numerous ways, as when Pandora.com uses musically relevant textual tags such as "downtempo beats" and "female vocalist" to hone in on a user's musical preferences.

Lest I forget to mention...

The recent lecture yielded no "muddy points" for me.

"Muddy point" for Week 5

A fairly basic question this week. I've never worked with Dublin Core, so I'm not sure how far its purview extends. For example, does the metadata by default feed into search engines, if the digital library exists online? Could the cataloger specify that as an option, or is Dublin Core's searchability always limited only to an institution's own network? It seems like it could be especially helpful for a commercial search engine to pick up on Dublin Core's metadata, but I could also understand why search engines might want to avoid metadata that has been pre-programmed by users (for example, to avoid spammers using false metadata as hooks to give their own sites a higher priority).

Assignment 2, Part 1

For the first part of Assignment 2 I chose five digital images I had taken from the upstairs windows of my house in New Mexico, and saved the large master copies in their own folder. I then used Microsoft Office Picture Manager and Pixlr.com (a great site; I'm glad to know about it now!) to reduce the photographs to smaller versions and create extra-small thumbnails. Finally, I uploaded the reduced-dpi photos, the thumbnails, and (just for good measure) the master copies all to my Flickr page, creating a set for this assignment. Here's the link to the whole set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43242999@N03/sets/72157622394273731/

And here are copies of the images, just to enhance the look of my web page!

First, a sunset viewed from the balcony:



Next, a sunset detail:



Thirdly, a small rainstorm sweeping over South Mountain at sunset:



Fourthly, the full moon setting over the Sandia Mountains one morning:



And finally, a rainbow ending at South Mountain:



Enjoy!

Week 4 reading notes

Witten 2.2 --

It appears that information overload was a problem even as far back as 1674; the quotation from Hyde illustrates that it has always been problematic to try to condense vast amounts of information into mere subject headings and organize the headings helpfully. I'm glad to learn the term collocation, a more specific term for the methods of organizing information in a library, and I'm interested in the author's implication that confirmation is now an essential middle stage in digital information retrieval, along with increased priorities on acquisition and navigation.

The article also points out the more fluid boundaries of digital objects, which can be so easily copied/altered. This makes me think about how important it is to annotate versions and provide adequate metadata. Other interesting points were raised, too... for instance, the chart showing the dozens of spellings of Muammar Qaddafi's name illustrates how difficult it can be to acquire comprehensive metadata when so many variables are in place, as well as the need for programming the variants as cross-references.

Witten 5.4-5.7 --

Part of this chapter reiterates what I've learned in previous classes about how different bibliographic metadata format standards fill different needs: some (e.g. MARC) providing rich details (for example, for the unique documents held by archivists) and some (e.g. Dublin Core) aiming more for breadth and interoperability. I was interested to learn more about BibTEX and Refer, as well, since I had never even heard of these standards before. So many standards! I'm glad the article addressed the possibilities for their interoperability. This article also gave a good rundown of multimedia file formats, so I'll keep it in mind as a useful resource.

I was interested to hear that key phrase metadata can be obtained automatically from digital documents with some degree of success. This surely solves some of the problems Hyde was worrying about more than 300 years ago! And the article illustrated why it's helpful to build a key phrase hierarchy for enhanced data retrieval.

Gilliland - Introduction to Metadata --


This article provided a pretty good summary of metadata, finding aids, and the structure of information systems. I'm especially interested in what the author said about user-created metadata systems that are flourishing on the Web. I understand that lack of quality control is a concern with such grassroots-level tagging, but I also see how this is a helpful way for huge amounts of data to be collectively organized by multiple people.

Much of what the author said (e.g. about the value of metadata) was already clear to me after 1.5 years of library school, but I do appreciate the author's charts illustrating the various types/characteristics of metadata, which help me to see categorical distinctions among descriptors.

Weibel - Border Crossings: Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building --


I was glad to read (albeit briefly; there weren't many details) about an attempt to involve representatives from so many different communities in bringing together disparate metadata standards. Interacting and networking among various professions and disciplines is crucial to effective Information Science practices, and this was a brief glimpse into some of the concerns/confusions/challenges that arise when various institutions attempt to collaborate, each employing its own standards and assumptions. As I said, I might have liked more details rather than just summary statements, but I'm glad at least to see that collaboration is happening.

No muddiness so far...

My small group has tentatively decided to use DSpace for our digital library project, so I've been poking around DSpace.org and taking notes on this week's guest lecture, preparing to install and experiment with it. It seems like a great way to archive materials once we learn how to use it, so I'm willing to put in the initial work that it will apparently require to make it happen.

So far I've been gathering materials for our project, but it hasn't yet come time to post them... I'll make another blog post if or when I run into any DSpace difficulties.

Just wondering...

I realize that Prof. He said at the end of lecture we didn't have to write "muddiest points" for this week; I'm just making a quick blog post while the course is on my mind. I'm still not clear on the logistics of the exam next month -- how it will be administered, how much time we'll have, etc. -- but I suppose there will be enough time to figure it out before it occurs. And I assume there's only one exam this semester?

The lecture clarified a lot of points for me about digitization, the pros and cons of various standards and formats, and hosting content online. I'll have to check out the PURL examples at the OCLC site.