Reading Comments Week #13

Dustin's blog
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=1693482552938456993&postID=9057758121596538993&page=1


Maggie's blog
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4657309357315020681&postID=4495916162585289725&page=1

Muddiest Point Week #12 Revisted

After viewing the class presentation on Sunday morning I was wondering why so little class time was spent on podcasts? I am familiar with blogs and wikis because of school assignments but I know little about podcasts.

Muddiest Point week #12

No video was posted so its difficult to have a muddy point from class. This week's topic was social software. I looked through the power point slides but it left alot to be desired without a video or audio presentation. The university is closed for the holidays so I assume no one was there to post the video before the muddiest point due date.

Readings week #13

2 readings and 1 video for this week. The 2 readings were 2 websites.
No Place To Hide Website--Robert O'Harrow, Jr. and the Center for Investigative Reporting
This website has many links. The website presents multimedia investigations by news organizations working together concerning the government's expanded surveillance authorities and activities in the wake of September 11, 2001. The government uses private data collection to watch its citizens in the name of security. This site also comments on the passing of inaccurate information among government agencies.
Electronic Privacy Information Center Website
Another website with many links devoted to privacy and security issues in an electronic age. This site discusses the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and "Total or Terrorism Information Awarness" (TIA). TIA sought to establish a "grand, virtual, centralized database" by using data mining or knowledge discovery tools in order to deter terrorism. Law enforcement was suppose to be given access to private data such as the financial, medical, communication, and travel records of individuals without a suspicion of wrong doing or a warrant. This agency's funding was eliminated in 2003, but, according to this site, this did not end this type of government activity. Data mining by the government using private information databases continues.
The video was title "Is Privacy Dead" by Jeffrey Rosen. Some good points were made by Mr. Rosen concerning the design of technology to both protect privacy and aide security. He stated that surveillence issues are not technological issues but political and cultural issues. He also talked about the US governments data mining activities. He also compared policies in place in Britain and the US. He used examples of "naked machines" at Heathrow and Phoenix airports and the use of surveillance cameras through Britain. Interesting ideas on democratic and heirarchal thinking as well as classification and exclusion and cultural differences. It was interesting that cameras in Britain have not deterred crime.

Reading Comments week #12

Amanda's I.T. blog
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4815117704244121663&postID=7919017436162120728&page=1

Rebecca's Intro to IT blog
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5720842264846496247&postID=3966162379616194587&page=1

Muddiest Point Week #11

I was wondering about the physical set up of a digital repository. Is it on site at the university? Does it have built in redundancy either on site or at another geographical location? How are issues of equipment failure, natural disaster, and information loss handled?

Readings week #12

Week 12's reading seemed to center around so called "social software."
The first article was about weblogs or commonly called blogs. This article contained a brief history as well as some ideas for using blogs. I appreciated this article since it gave definitions for commonly used terms. I also found the discussion on push/pull types of technology useful.
The second article was about using wiki technology to better serve patrons in a library setting. As with blogs, free software is available to enable this technology. Wikis promote shared knowledge and cooperation to create resources.
The third article discussed social tagging, the creation of bookmarks for websites that are saved online. These tags have subject keywords and description attached for searching purposes. The del.icio.us site was described as a place to collaborate by sharing tags and discovering new resources. Problems with social tagging include variations in tags, user understanding of keywords, and spagging (spam tagging).
The final reading was actually a video of Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. It was enlightening to realize the huge size of Wikipedia, the international use, and the number of paid employees-one. Additionally, it operates on a free license and is funded by donations and is run by volunteers. Jimmy Wales is also often misquoted by the media. It was also interesting to hear about how the entire Wikipedia functions with regard to deleting pages and who has the final word. Also of interest was the discussion over the citation merits of Wikipedia since this is a topic that has been of interest in other classes.

Comments week #11 Readings

Analog failure
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=84548656281186042&postID=1818833400642052070&page=1

Maggie's blog
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4657309357315020681&postID=1295012642050597602&page=1

Muddiest Point week #10

People manipulate a web crawler by increasing links in their work. How do web crawlers recognize this and fight against it?

Readings Week #11

Two of this week's readings were about digital libraries and one was about institutional repositories.
Digital Libraries Challenges and Influential Work
Federal support funded the Digital Library Initiative, DLI-1 in 1994 and DLI-2 in 1998. The purpose of the DLI projects were to make large scale digital resources and collections accessible and interoperable. University led teams worked with commercial vendors and software companies to define and identitfy important document, data, and metadata standards and protocols for Web based searching. The DLI program contributed to the development of best practices. Significant technology was transferred from this program. A spin off from DLI program resulted in Google.
Dewey Meets Turing Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
This article discussed the association of the National Science Foundation with the Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994 . It also mentioned that Google emerged from funded work. This article dealt mainly with the relationships between Librarians and Computer Scientists as a result of their working together on Digital Libray projects. Publishers are also mentioned as interested parties to Digital Library development. According to this article the DLI project is seen as broadening opportunities for library science since the core functions of librarianship, organizing, collating and presenting information still need to be preformed.
Institutional Depositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
This article concerned the need for universities to move beyond their historically passive roles of supporting publishers and into the development and maintenance of digital repositories. Recent technological trends and developments, such as the drop in online storage costs and standards development, have made this possible. The development of an institutional repository requires collaboration among the institution's community as well as a commitment to organization, access, distribution, and long term preservation of digital materials produced by its members. In this article an institutional repository is seen as "complement and a supplement rather than a substitute for traditional scholarly publication venues." This author of this article warns of possible problems with institutional repositories, among which are the problems associated with material loss due to technical failure. Little built in system redundancy is also mentioned.

Comments week #10

Renee's Published as week 11
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7804417981817162815&postID=7468087571052576296&page=1

Analog Failure
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=84548656281186042&postID=8457762204976437600&page=1

Assignment #6 My Website

View my website at:

Susanna's Website

Muddiest point Class #9

I am still alittle uncertain about XML. When it is said that XML does not use predefined tags, that you define your own, wouldn't that lead to alot of computer confusion? Or is it the use of the DTD or XML Schema that tells the computer what your tags mean?

Readings week #10

The article by David Hawking was all about search engines. Search engines index and answer billions of queries per day. They provide high quality answers and reject low value content. The major search engines named in this article are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. A large, geographically distributed infrastructure is neccessary in order to support a search engine. Search engines use crawling algorithms to compile lists of URLs. Crawlers use links in documents to find high quality websites. Documents without links are often not searched by crawlers. Crawlers can be prone to system problems and failures, and spammers in addition to a failure to consider unlinled documents. The second part of this article concerned the methods used by crawlers to index documents, usually by creating an inverted file that is stored, often compressed, in memory. Search engines often maintain lists of common queries in order to return search results quickly.
The next two articles concerned the deep, hidden, or invisible web as opposed to the surface web. Search engines usually do a poor job of accessing quality content from the deep web since article in the deep web are often html documents without links. The article about the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting discusses the open access method for gaining federated access to eprint archives through metadata harvesting and aggregation. OAI's goal is to develop and promote interoperability standards and efficient dissemination of content. The OAIPMH protocal is based on common standards and was funded by grants. OAIPMH attempts to provide better communication between data providers who build repositories and collections with important content and services providers who are harvesters that build services for collections and contents. The final article, which was a bit dated concerned the use of a for cost product called "Brightlight" which claimed to be a search engine capable of searching the entire web, the surface and the deep web.