My Website

Here is the URL for my website:


http://www.pitt.edu/~thg9/

Comments on others' blogs

http://maj66.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-12-readings.html?showComment=1290870580581#c1471750521571797185

and

http://barbcmblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-12-reading-notes.html?showComment=1290870838123#c8643404966697184115

Readings for 11/29

LOVED the clip about Wikipedia.  I use Wikipedia pretty frequently and found the video to be really interesting and I think the Wikibooks project sounds great.  The number of volunteers working on this is staggering.  Logically, it doesn't seem like any of this should work as well as it does.  I enjoyed hearing about the quality control measures in place.  I always kind of wondered exactly how that worked.

The article about librarians making their own wikis was also pretty cool.  I'd never thought about the possibilities for librarians before.  I'm sure I'll be making use of these in my career.

The social tagging article was also really interesting.  I think that would be a great innovation for libraries.  After all, we want people to be able to find information.  What better way than to have patrons come up with the tags that make the most sense to them?

The article about blogging was also helpful.  I think the idea of using blogs for collaboration is a cool one.  It does sound like it would be a lot easier to use for that than the seemingly endless stream of back-and-forth e-mails. 

Muddiest Point from 11/22

I thought that the BUBL link looked pretty cool.  I was wondering exactly why that never took off. 

Comments on others' blogs

http://rjs2600.blogspot.com/2010/11/readings-for-11-22-11-26.html?showComment=1290040002439#c7097249651523005350

and


http://jobeths2600blog.blogspot.com/2010/11/unit-11.html?showComment=1290040200704#c9016868948635311377

11/17/2010 Readings for 11/22/2010

The article "Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting" was interesting to me, since I think that Open Archives Initiatives are such a cool device.  I thought it was interesting that the OAI protocol can provide some access to parts of the deep web.  I didn't know that was even possible!  I also appreciated how the protocol can be applicable to other areas, other than the one for which it was designed.

"Web Search Engines:  Part 1" was a little hard to find, but I was able to locate it for free after some effort on my part.  I wasn't about to pay 19 cents for it.  Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the number of servers for the largest search engines is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.  Wow!  I guess that makes sense, I'd just never really thought about what all would be required for such a gargantuan effort.  I liked how the process of the web crawlers was explained.

"Web Search Engines:  Part 2" reminded me of the project we did for LIS 2005, so yeah...I shuddered.  I thought it was spelled out pretty clearly.  I felt that both articles presented a pretty clear view of how web search engines operate.

11/17/2010 Muddiest Point

I don't have a muddiest point this week. 

Comments for readings from 11/15/2010

http://mfarina.blogspot.com/2010/11/readings-for-unit-10-m-farina.html?showComment=1289443097365#c251258152226881778

and

http://rjs2600.blogspot.com/2010/11/readings-for-11-15-11-19.html?showComment=1289443540902#c4360631563333480933

Readings for 11/15/10

"Dewey Meets Turing" was an interesting article, which presented a lot of information that I either didn't know or hadn't even considered.  I liked the interplay between what the computer scientists expected and the expectations of librarians.  I never really considered that the World Wide Web would have been a complicating factor in this mix.  I liked the point that while technology has altered the library profession, the author felt there were a lot of promising features in this new horizon.  I especially liked the part about the increased opportunity for librarians to work in conjunction with scholarly writers.  I like the idea of being partners with scholars and helping them in sharing their works with the world.

The Mischo article about Digital Libraries and their challenges was a nice history lesson.  I guess I hadn't realized that there were so many universities which played a part in the whole Digital Libraries Initiative.  I also hadn't really thought about just how far things have come in such a short period of time.  The author cites the fact that as of the writing of the article, over 80,000 unique full-text journal articles were online.  That's really amazing!

The final article about institutional repositories by Clifford A. Lynch was also really informative.  I appreciated the emphasis on how this needed to be a group effort among librarians, IT people, records and archives managers, faculty, and the policymakers and officials at the university.  I think this is something that is often overlooked.  It's a pretty big effort involving a LOT of people!  I think that Lynch maybe errs on the side of assuming that faculty aren't tech savvy at all.  I think that a lot of newer faculty members would be quite comfortable with working in this medium.  Yes, librarians would be a big asset, but I don't think that ALL academic scholars would be as clueless as Lynch suggests. 

Muddiest Point from 11/08/10 class

I'm not sure when we would use XML Document Type Declarations and when we would opt to use XML schema. 

Koha assignment

http://upitt01-staff.kwc.kohalibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/virtualshelves/shelves.pl?viewshelf=95

My user name is thg9 and the name of the virtual bookshelf is "Iowa."

Comments on other posts 11/03

http://mfarina.blogspot.com/2010/11/reading-notes-for-week-9-m-farina.html?showComment=1288828173570#c5594645636579397631

and

http://bds46.blogspot.com/2010/10/reading-notes-week-9.html?showComment=1288828529022#c134503765765393313

Readings for 11/8

I thought that Martin Bryan's article entitled, "An Introducxtion to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)" was pretty informative.  I like the emphasis on how XML has so much more flexibility than its predecessors.  I also had no idea that XML would assign a default definition if no DTD was present. 

Uche Ogbuji's article on the core standards of XML was useful with its links and tutorials.  It would make a great reference tool for those working on XML. 

The XML Tutorial about Extending Your Markup was presented in a nice, user-friendly format, especially for beginners.  I liked the definition of DTD as context-free grammar.  That kind of made sense to me!  The Extensible Stylesheet Language part was also useful, though I had to read that section a few times to really understand it. 

The tutorial from w3schools.com was also helpful.  I know I'll be referring to it constantly on the final assignment...

Muddiest Point, November 3

As I look over my notes, I'm not sure why we can't use Microsoft Word when using HTML.  I have a note that says, "Creat a text file, don't use Microsoft Word.  Use Notepad to open."  I know that there has to be a good reason, but unfortunately I didn't put that down in my notes...