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.