Week 11 Lab

Google Scholar

Query: "digital library" years = 2008-2012

Query: "virtual reference" years = 2008-2012

Web of Science

Query: "digital library" years = 2008-2012

Query: "virtual reference" years = 2008-2012

Week 12 Reading Notes

Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2 (Hawking, D.)

• I would be very interested in what kinds of indexing methods search engines use for organizing information on the Web—crawling algorithms.
• I found the part about spam rejection very interesting—especially how some spam sites will give crawlers different information than they give to site visitors.
• I found both of these articles completely fascinating and have determined that I want to be a crawler when I grow up.

Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (Shreeves, S., et al)

• This article was written in 2005. How was OAI changed since then?
• How was it decided that Dublin Core became a sort of metadata standard for OAI?
• For the Sheet Music Consortium, how effective is it that users are annotating the metadata records?

White Paper: The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value (Bergman, M.)

• What search engines, if any, use BrightPlanet’s search technology that retrieves both deep and surface content?
• When it comes to the size of the surface and deep Web, how has it changed since 2000?
• Does having full access to the deep Web mean that we will be able to retrieve more accurate and relevant information or that we will simply retrieve more information that is perhaps irrelevant?
• Are people not finding what they want on the Web because of limited access or because they lack sufficient searching skills, such as using synonyms for search terms? Or perhaps there’s already too much information that people have to sift through?

Week 11 Reading Notes

Digital Libraries (Mischo, W.)

• I wish Mischo explicitly explained what the difference is between providing access to a digital collection and providing digital library services.
• For the Illinois journals project, what exactly makes their collection of e-content a digital library? How is it different from merely providing access to these journals on the Internet?

Dewey Meets Turing (Paepcke, A., et al.)

• Interesting that this articles claims that the unification of librarians and computer scientists is a “matchmaking coup.” I’ve heard that students in the IS program don’t consider the MLIS program a “hard science,” though I don’t think any of us consider ourselves “hard scientists.” This highlights how there definitely needs to be better relationships between librarians and computer scientists in order to move libraries into the future.

Institutional Repositories (Lynch, C.)

• Based on the previous article, I would be curious to know whether Lynch is writing this article from the computer scientist perspective, the librarian perspective, or an entirely different perspective?
• Academic libraries are mentioned when it comes to digital libraries, but what about other types of libraries (medical, public, school, special, etc.)?

Week 9 Lab

URL: http://pitt.edu/~mar189/lab9.html

Week 10 Reading Notes

IBM: Introduction to XML (Tidwell, D.)

• XML = Extensible Markup Language (allows you to create your own tags, which seems user-friendly, but users must be familiar with markup language before they can effectively use XML).
• XML appears to be much more detailed (see address example), which means more work, but it also means that it’s easier to extract specific information later (saves efforts down the road).
• Also remember that XML is stricter than HTML.
• XML seems similar to HTML5 (in that there are very specific rules and a strict set of standards to adhere to).
• DTDs show relationships and create definitions—very important!
• XSL = Extensible Stylesheet Language (seems like it would be similar to CSS, but appears to define your tags, elements, etc. rather than controlling the design of your webpage).
• SOAP—not to be confused with SOPA.

IBM: A Survey of XML Standards: Part 1 (Ogbuji, U.)

• Good to note that not only does this article recommend W3Schools as an XML resource, but so does the above article from Tidwell.
• Why are there “many flavors of standards?” Shouldn’t there just be one set of standards?
• What and who make up the “XML community?”
• For XML’s more complex and detailed opportunities, this is a great resource because it provides a large collection of other resources.

W3Schools: XML Schema Tutorial

• This is basically like any other W3Schools tutorial we’ve been introduced—a very useful introduction to this type of markup language.
• XML Schema Language = XML Schema Definition (XSD).
• I think it’s great that you can choose whether attributes are optional or required (allows for some flexibility).
• My partner compares XML to and Excel doc, whereas HTML is more like a Word doc.
• It would be helpful if W3Schools provided a few resources for XML editors.

Week 9 Reading Notes

W3Schools: HTML5 Tutorial

• Am I the only one who doesn’t know what a ruby annotation is?
• I wonder how it was decided which HTML 4.01 elements would be removed from HTML5. Who had a say in this?
• So, does HTML5 not require Flash in order for videos to be shown?
• Which is the most common video format: HP4, WebM, or Ogg? Good to note that Google Chrome supports all three video formats.
• Again, which is the most common audio format: MP3, Wav, or Ogg? And again, Chrome supports all three audio formats.
• If you decide to use Geolocation on a website, it is extremely important to explain your users why this is important to you and to have some sort of privacy policy they can refer to.
• This tutorial exemplifies how/why Internet Explorer is an inferior browser—it supports very few of the new HTML5 elements.

Wikipedia: HTML5

• If HTML5 was first proposed by Opera, why doesn’t the Opera browser support all of the new elements? In fact, it appeared that Google Chrome was the most supportive browser.
• The above can be explained by the fact that Ian Hickson of Google is the current HTML5 editor.

W3Schools: HTML vs. XHTML

• XHTML seems a lot less user-friendly for the general public (due to its strict rules), but it does a better job at adhering to a set of standards. It’s more time-consuming, but I also feel like it’s less confusing because of its strict rules.