Week of 11/16 lectures and reading

First off, I enjoyed the discussion about the Internet Archive's "wayback machine". I'd also wondered why certain sites were archived and other sites weren't, so thank you for clearing that up, Dr. He. I also enjoyed learning about the Perseus DL and its origins.

There are no muddiest points for this week.

Muddiest Point for Week of 11/9/10

This isn't really a "muddiest point" post as much as it a comment on submitting the assignments and the digital dropbox and what not. When I submitted assignment 1 via the digital dropbox, I actually just added it without hitting "submit", so it just lingered there for weeks before I realized that the instructor(s) may have not received it. I straightened out the situation with the TA and submitted assignments 2 and 3 as well as the exam without a problem. Based upon the chart that Dr. He showed at the beginning of class last Tuesday, it seemed to indicate that despite the fact that my assignment 1 was in fact submitted and (when I pointed out that I'd submitted it weeks earlier) graded, I hadn't submitted the assignment. Thus, I e-mailed Dr. He and the TA yet again and hopefully this will be straightened out and my work for this assignment will count!

The bottom line to this, I guess, is that I much prefer submitting assignments via the Assignments tab or directly via e-mail as opposed to the Digital dropbox.

Week of 11/9 lectures and reading

I really enjoyed this week's lecture and some of the readings as well. In fact, it may have been my favorite lecture so far in the entire course. I'm very interested in the process of digitization and preservation and the issues surrounding it. Like many, I found it ironic that Google doesn't even preserve its history going back to 1998 and furthermore, I have to agree that digitization is just a way to backup originals and shouldn't be used as a substitute for them. This point was further evidenced by the amount examples cited like the Alexandria Library in which innumerable resources were lost forever. As always, it's best to have multiple copies of documents for the sake of preservation. In any case, it reminded me of some of the things covered in the Intro to Archives class I took last spring, so it's nice to see tie-ins with other courses and subjects, too.

Exam

I wasn't sure if we were supposed to post an entry last week because of the exam and the fact that was no class and no assigned readings, but just in case, I wanted to share my thoughts on it. Although we had 3 days to do it, I did it over the course of 3 evenings and it took me until about 10 PM on the night it was due to finish. I didn't mind it that much, though. It gave me a good chance to get reacquainted with the notes/slides from each previous lecture (though it concentrated heavily on the 1st few weeks or it seemed that way to me) and it was a good way to re-learn some of the information that we've learned so far in the course as well. I just hope that I did OK.

Muddiest Point for the week of 10/26

Since we submitted Assignment 3 last Tuesday, I'm wondering when Assignment 2 will be graded.

Readings for week of 10/26

OK this is my first post on here in a while since we didn't have class the week before last due to FastTrack weekend. Of all the readings for this week, I found the one by Papy (Chapter 1 of Digital Libraries) to be the most interesting. Particularly, the passage "the average yuser looks for one answer, not all possible answers. The librarian's obsession with delivering all possible answers is a surplus in quality that is not appreciated by the user". Furthermore, Papy goes on to add that "(librarians) no longer play the role of the mediator between the user and the system". This goes to the heart of the debate on not only what a digital library is, but how users interact within a library context and how librarians respond to that. Our profession likes to think that librarians will be needed in the future to help customers get the correct information for whatever they're looking for, but the way that this will be done has to change in accordance with the above.

I'd also like to add that I enjoyed watching everyone's presentation proposals. I think it's interesting that groups will work on everything from digitizing movie posters to digitizing files for an Eskimo language.

Muddiest Point for Week of 10/5/10

Based upon the last slide in the lecture, Assignment 3 is due on 10/19. However, in the syllabus, the due date shown is 10/26. Which is correct? I hope that it's the latter, of course. Another student already brought up this question on the dB, but I'm still unclear on it as well.