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.

Readings and lecture for the week of 10/5/10

After watching the 10/5 lecture on XML and doing the readings, I thought that some concepts about XML that were confusing were now a little bit more illuminated. The lecture was generally easy to understand and quite informative. I tend to learn more by doing than by observing, though, so I think that once I start on Assignment 3, I'll really "get it" then.

Additionally, I'm also taking Metadata now and we're discussing and reading about XML in great detail there, too, so I think that this will help me with Assignment 3 and with understanding XML better as well.

Since we don't have a lecture this coming week, I look forward to seeing everyone on Saturday 10/16 in Pittsburgh for FastTrack weekend!

Reflections on Assignments 1 and 2

When I originally completed and attempted to submit assignments 1 and 2, I didn't realize that I had to hit "send" in the Digital Dropbox instead of just adding them. Thus, I was wondering why I hadn't received my grade and the TA informed that it wasn't visible for that reason. After resubmitting them properly, I finally received my grade for Assignment 1 and was glad that the error was overlooked and forgiven.

Assignment 2 - part one

Here is the link to my flickr folder.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/87025663@N00/sets/72157625104724484/with/5056071338/

These are just five random photos that were taken this past summer. In case anyone's wondering, the street sign and the photo of the Dia Museum were both taken in Beacon, NY this past June. The photos of the band Flower and the singer/songwriter Don McGlashan were taken this past July in Brooklyn, NY. Last but not least, the photo of our cat Lola was taken in July right here in Philadelphia since she's on our kitchen table (a favorite spot of hers).

Metadata readings and lecture

I found this past week's lecture very interesting because I'm also currently taking LIS 2407, which is (as the instructor noted) the brand new Metadata class that's now being offered. In that class, we've already learned about Dublin Core, MARC and MODS, so the lecture and the associated readings were a bit of a refresher for me. Part of me wishes that I would've taken this course beforehand just to get a better handle on Metadata and on XML, which we'll be learning about both in this course and in Metadata next week, but the overlap is helpful as concepts are reiterated and reinforced.

Muddiest Point for Week 4

I am still unclear on the post structure. From what I heard last week when a student in class asked this question to one of Dr. He's PhD students, I understand that we have to comment on the readings before the lectures. I know the readings should be done before the lectures on Tuesdays, but these blog posts have to be in by each Saturday before each lecture. So should I be commenting on the readings assigned for the week of 9/28 or 9/21?

Week 4 readings and some comments on Week 3

I didn't post on here last week due to there being no readings for that week while we worked on setting up and testing out Greenstone and DSpace. Thus, I wasn't sure if we were still supposed to post on here or not. Though I initially had troubling setting up Greenstone, I was finally able to get it to work and find it relatively easy to use. I think that for the project, my group will end up using it instead of DSpace due to what was said in this past week's lecture.

Now onto this week's readings. I thought that there was a little bit of a disconnect between this week's lecture and the readings. For example, identifiers were only mentioned at the end of the lecture, while most of it was taken up by talking about digitization issues in general. There was, however, a lot of talk about DOI, so perhaps I'm wrong about this.

Readings for Week 2

Of the required readings for week 2, the one that stood out the most was the Arms reading (Chapter 2). The link that was posted in the "Lectures" section didn't work, so I looked in "Books" and found it there. Here is a direct link to it for those who may have not been able to find it and happen to be reading this.

Anyway, this reading reminded me of things we had to read in LIS 2000 and in other courses about the history of the internet. Although most of the information in this article should be common knowledge to most MLIS students at this point, it was still a nice refresher.

On the other hand, because it dates back to the late '90s, it felt arcane, as did the Arms/Blanchi/Overly and Payette/Blanchi/Lagoze/Overly articles as well. It made me wonder when we'll get to read more recent literature on the subject of Digital Libraries. I also felt that these readings were difficult to understand, too full of technical jargon and ultimately a bit frustrating.

I received the Lesk book in the mail today from Amazon and I see that it's from 2005, though, so I look forward to reading it.

Muddiest Point for Week 1

After watching last week's lecture and reading over the syllabus, I still have the following question.

When we update our blogs, should we do the readings for each week ahead of the lecture or during the week? For example, would our week 2 summaries be due this coming Saturday or were they already due this past Saturday?

Week 1 Readings

Dewey Meets Turing

I thought this article, which describes the Digital Libraries Initiative, was interesting because it highlighted the differences between computer scientists and librarians/information science professionals. It's evident that contrary to the Borgman chapter that we read, the rise of the Web as an information medium influenced the thinking of this article, particularly in the section titled The Cuckoo Egg's Surprise.

Borgman, Chapter 2

This was, to me, the most interesting of the articles that we had to read for Week 1. Partially this is, as others have pointed out, because it was written a decade ago and of course, much has changed in the development of digital libraries since that time, some things in unimaginable ways. I'd like to see an article that revisited this one and commented on these changes.

Nevertheless, one of the main points in this article endures today. On page 48, she contrasts the evolutionary and revolutionary views of digital libraries and this is what I found really interesting. Even in this day and age of e-readers and virtually unlimited (and often times free) online content being the source of many users' information, the optimist in me would like to see the "evolutionary" model of digital libraries supplementing and not supplanting (as the "revolutionary" model would suggest) physical libraries.

Setting the Foundations of Digital Libraries
To be quite honest, I found this article the least engaging out of all the articles we had to read for Week 1. The talk of architecture, hierachies, structure and even manifestos just didn't really compute for me.

Digital Libraries
This article nicely contrasts the average end user's expectations and experiences with searching with the expectations of the average librarian or information professional. I also found all of the information about XML interesting as well. Though it's from only one year later, it also didn't seem to be as dated as the Borgman chapter that we read.

Introduction

Hello. My name is Matt Berlyant. I'm in my 5th semester as a FastTrack student and I live in Philadelphia. I already recognize a few familiar names from looking at some of the other blogs, though many of the folks in this class are previously unknown to me. I'm a bit late to the party here, but here's my first post for LIS 2670 Digital Libraries. I hope the few of you who'll read this will enjoy it.

If you wanna know where I got the URL of this blog from, here's a hint.

Here we go.