Saturday, November 20, 2010

Unit 11 Comments

http://elviaarroyo.blogspot.com/2010/11/muddiest-point-week-11.html?showComment=1290283782601#c1003666309790071141

http://megrentschler.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-11-reading-notes-112210.html?showComment=1290285267571#c4657033645216888267

Unit 11

Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2
These short articles covered a lot of search engines' facets from how they find websites to how the websites are ranked. I know someone who gets paid $12 an hour to make webpages appear higher in the results list. I'm not sure how she does it, but it's an actual job.


Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting
Since this was written five years ago, I am wondering how protocols have progressed. I looked at the website for OLAC and was impressed by the ease of the interface. Fifteen more data providers have joined the community since 2005, for a total of 42. This is a great resource, however, how are users supposed to find these websites? I don't know if I would have stumbled across this had it not been assigned for our reading.


The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value
There were too many disclaimers in this reading such as "little confidence in these results" to make me trust the statistics. I'm sure the general principles discussed (the deep web is larger than we imagine and relevant information is not being accessed) are true, but the accuracy of the data does not seem reliable.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Unit 10 Muddiest Point

Does the average system manager have a computer science or library science background? Is there a trend toward either program?

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Unit 10 Comments

http://mszewczak.blogspot.com/2010/11/reading-notes-week-10.html?showComment=1289703072856#c7025772975363151728

http://pratt2600.blogspot.com/2010/11/1115-reading-notes.html?showComment=1289703406603#c4990682829750681465

Unit 10

Digital Libraries
I wonder why the Library of Congress was not involved in the first Digital Libraries Initiative. Were/are librarians overlooked when it comes to information technology?


Dewey meets Turing
This article answers my previous question about librarians’ role in the development of information technology. It paints a static picture of the profession slow to adapt to new developments.


Institutional Repositories
The author raises good points on digital repositories about how they should be managed and what their impact can be on scholarship. I will be interested to see what kind of partnerships are formed between universities and other institutions to document the community they share. The one topic I wish he could have explained more was how access to online archives collections would be administered.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Unit 9 Muddiest Point

Can you tell just by looking at a web site whether the underlying tags are HTML or XML?